19 Important SEO Tips Simple, but still effective. 1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content. 2. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content. 3. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing. 4. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords. 5. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length. 6. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. About 25-30 words 7. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site's primary keywords. 8. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links. 9. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (Lynx source distribution directory) 10. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload. 11. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit The Web Robots Pages to learn more about Robots.txt file. 12. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking. 13. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings. 14. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam. 15. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation. 16. Avoid using trojans, malware, adware, spyware etc. on your pages.. 17. Better quality information leads to better quality results. 18. Check your pages linking structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link. 19. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings. Just a few tips that can be useful. Pretty Basic stuff here, but I thought I should share with you guys.
Don't forget 404 pages Create both a HTML and XML sitemap Build links Build links build links and build even more links!
Top tips and a very comprehensive list. Don't forget to make use of appropriate formating of keywords, primacy and continuity of keywords. Jimbob