SEO Cheat Sheet

1.    Consider the hosting environment, if a site is placed onto a server, which also hosts a site that has been picked up by the search engines for being either suspicious, unsuitable for minors, illegal etc... It can penalise all sites on the server. A useful tool to find out what other sites are being served by the web server is Robtex

2.    Craft Search Engine Friendly URLS, also known as know as magic urls or clean urls. These assist a search engine in mapping a path to your content and also give the search engine a reference. e.g: Turn /node/1 into something/useful or about.php into about_company_nam

3.    Ensure Browser Title is Concise.

4.    Have different Page titles to the browser title, eg: Browser Title: About Our Company Name, Page Title: Read more about how we helped... This reduces duplicate content and Gives the Search engines more information about the page.

5.    Use h1,h2,h3 tags, When constructing a page you should use h1 for the page title, h2 and h3 for relevant subtitles as these are the tags the search engine will look at for determining the content titles.

6.    Use Descriptive Alt tags in images, and hidden div’s to display richtext, Images and embedded content may look good, however they do NOTHING for SEO, therefore you should add descriptive text to alt tags.

7.    Don’t hide crucial content behind JavaScript, Search engines don’t pick up text that is written using client side code, so don’t be fancy with important text and links.

8.    Content is King, good relevant content is crucial.

9.    Avoid repeated content and web scraped content at all costs, The aim of Search Engines is to give Good fresh relevant content to users as the request it, the last thing the Search engines want to do is have the same content displayed in 50 of their results, if a Search Engine see duplicated content, it will not rank the content, or worse leave you site altogether.

10.    The Construction of the webpage is important, Frames and Heavily Nested tables will cause the Search engine to get stuck, leave your site or miss crucial information. Divs and css are the best method so far.

11.    W3C it is important for accessibility to keep as close to the w3c validated markup as you can. Note: full compliance is not necessary.

12.    Links within the site should be relative eg: /about-company-name/meet-the-team. It is also good to haave reciprocal links with other similar sites to point to yours.

13.    Install Analytics tracking software such as free Google Analytics.

14.    Use 301 Redirects to make broken pages more useful.

15.    Create a custom 404 page with a list of site links so if a search engine hits a broken page it will still have somewhere to go.

16.    Use Meta Tags, Short relevant meta descriptions and a few keywords.

17.    Do some Search Engine Marketing.

18.    Run a Google Ad words Campaign or similar campaign for chosen Search engine.