I made this thread after seeing quite a few questions being posted again and again (and again)... Here are some common questions - I will add more later I can't find my site in Google! Your site probably is in Google's Sandbox/Aging Delay effect. If you are trying to optimize keywords that are really competitive, you must wait a few months before being listed nicely. Should I use a hyphen (-) or an underscore (_) in a URL? Use the hyphen as search engines recognize this as seperators. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ Should use subdomains (subdomain.examplesite.com) or subfolders? (examplesite.com/directory)? There is no difference search engine wise. Can I use content that is already found on other sites? I wouldn't even if they allow you to as search engines penalize you forduplicate content. What is Black Hat SEO? This is when people use techniques that are unethical and something that breaks the search engines "rules". Do I need META tags? Apart from the title tag, everything else isn't important but they still can help. Why use H1 tags for the title? Because search engine use the H1 tags are a title - or the main theme of the site. Do .edu and .gov links give extra weight? No this is just a common myth. Why do blogs rank well in search engines? They have new content, each page has a title, every post is pinged to search engines and that they have lots of pages. What is KEI? KEI (Keywords Effectiveness Index) - KEI is just a system based on how popular a keywords is and how many other sites are optimizing it. How do I redirect safely? Using the 301 redirect - this is when search engines are told that the page has moved permanently. Example in PHP: header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: http://www.domainname.com/newplace/"); exit(); Code (markup): Can I link my sites together? Will the IP cause any problems? Yes you can link your sites together and no your IP's will not cause any problems - check out Matt Cutts video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3583760678227172395&q=matt+cut
Hey, this is a good list Here are a few more.. Why is a Site Map necessary from SEO point of view? A site map is a page that gives direct links to all the pages of a site. Site maps are useful because they help search engine spiders in indexing the website. Sitemaps can be useful for both small and large websites. What does Robots.txt do? The robots.txt file can control the way Search Engine spiders or robots spider your website. You can use this file to restrict access to parts of your website, or restrict certain SE spiders from indexing your site. What are In-bound links? Should they always point to home page? Inbound links are links from other sites / web pages pointing to your website. It is not necessary that in-bound links always point to your home page. You can get links to any internal page of your website.
Blogs are just websites. They don't necessarily rank better than non-blog websites. Having new content, and having lots of pages won't in themselves get your pages ranked higher. I think I've seen some posts recently in which the poster complained that his blog was not ranking well. Not sure what "every post is pinged to search engines" means...
Thanks for posting it on your blog! When you write a post, it get's pinged to the search engines and so they know that you've got new content. Anyway, point taken I'll try to remove that one. Now that's what I call a good list! More to come!