18 Domain and URL Best Practices for SEO

Place Keywords within URLs and Filenames

As URLs are typically one of the first things read by a search engine using keywords within them is one of the most consequential SEO details.

Maintain Your Website

If your website is hosted on a server that constantly crashes, or if you have pages that are blocked or no longer exist make sure you take the proper measures to maintain your website. When a search engine comes to index your website you want it up and running at its peak. Keeping your website maintained is the best way to do so.

Make Your Visual Media Search Engine Friendly

Use JavaScript Wisely

Using JavaScript to display content can add great features to your website. However, in the long run, it can also make content harder to be reached by search engines. When using JavaScript do so wisely and keep the code clean.

Make Use of Image <alt> Attribute

Text only websites are typically dull and image based websites are unrecognizable to search engines. Find a good balance between related content and images, and always make use of the image <alt> attribute. However do not keyword stuff the <alt> attribute as this will hurt your rankings.

Content is King!

Good Techniques

Use Original Related Content

The more original content (directly written for your website) you have on your website the better. This is for many reasons, however one of the most direct being, more content equals potentially more keywords and the more keywords the better the rankings.

Consistently Add New Content

Adding new content to your website is not only preferred by search engines but by users as well. (Blogs perform extremely well because of this.) Making minor updates to previous content is not considered as adding new content.

The Most Unique and Inspiring Google Logos

Google does a lot of interesting things, of which one of the most popular being periodically changing their logo to reflect current events. In the past 10 years we have had the pleasure of seeing quite a few fascinating and delightful logo designs. Most often we see these imaginative logos around holidays, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and other popular holidays. We are often surprised to see new logos unexpectedly, most recently for the 40th anniversary of Comic-Con. Outlined here are over 300 of the most brilliantly designed Google logos.

2009

40th Anniversary of Comic-Con – July 23, 2009

How to Make The Most of Your Meta Tags

Looking to jump to the top of search engines? Some people believe all you need to do is drop a few simple meta tags into your code and the rest is history. Truth be told, meta tags play a very minor role in determining search engine rankings. (Quite possibly no role at all depending on whom you talk to.) However this does not mean you should ignore your meta tags. Outlined below I recommend how to make the most out of some of the most popular meta tags.

<Description> Meta Tag

While meta tags are becoming of less value each day they are still important to include MSN and Yahoo!. Still play close attention to the <description> tag and often times the <description> tag will show up as the description of your site in search results.

Linking Advice - Internal, Inbound, & Outbound

Powerful Linking Strategies

Inbound Links Anchor Text

Any inbound link to your website is of benefit, however having bound links with the anchor text directly related to your keyword is the best. This is perhaps one of the quickest ways to obtain quick rankings.

Inbound Links Origin

Apart from having keyword anchor text, you want your inbound links to come from a creditable source and if possible a source with a decent Google Page Rank.

Maximize Your Keyword Efficiency

The Do's

Use Keywords within <title> Tag

The <title> tab is perhaps the most important place to have a keyword. The reason being, any text within the <title> tag shows up in search results as your page title. Keep your title short (7 words maximum) and use your keyword towards the beginning.

Use Keywords within URL

Keywords within your URL (www.shayhowe.com/seo/keyword-dos-and-donts/) are an added bonus. Repeat keywords from your URL in your document text for reinforcement. If at all possible use dashes ( - ) to break up words within your URL over underscores ( _ ).

10 Keyword Research Tips to Maximize Your SEO Efforts

I have never heard anyone say that a website could have too much traffic, it is unheard of. People are always looking to obtain more traffic - and rightfully so. But how do you obtain large amounts of traffic? Research shows that the majority of all traffic comes from search engines. And how do you show up in search engines? You target specific keywords and market your website or pages around these keywords. With this, ideally the more keywords you target the more traffic you will see. Follow these top 10 keyword research tips to make the most out of your targeted list of keywords.