Radu Antohi.com

A short while ago I posted some on page ranking factors, mainly pointing at google’s ranking factors. As promised, this SEO checklist is related to off page factors such as linking etc.

Positive linking factors:
- Inbound text link the anchor you need to rank
- Inbound text links from good pagerank sites
- Listed in authority directories (DMOZ, Yahoo! etc.)
- Good neighbours (trusted sites such as Google, it never hurts to link back to them)
- Remember quality > quantity; If you’d have to choose between a link from MySpace’s homepage or 10,000 other backlinks, choose MySpace.

Bad linking factors:
- Too many external links
- Bad neighbours

Domain:
- General trust of a domain (Important!)
- Age
- Traffic of a domain. Many say that its not important, however in the Google Patent it is clearly mentioned that increasing traffic - good site.
- Keyword in domain name

This is all that comes to my mind at this moment! I will update this SEO Checklist as soon as I get more ideas.

SEO Checklist

These days I’ve been playing around with optimizing my gadget review blog. Here is the on-page search engine optimization that I do and that actually works (weird huh?). I will also write what on-page mistakes I did in the past, so make sure you avoid doing them.

Positive:

- Using my keyword in title
- Using my keyword in URL (raduantohi.com/seo-checklist, if seo checklist is what I am targeting)
- Using my keyword in the beginning of the text.
- Using the keyword in bold (not sure if this helps tho)
- Using keyword in ALT (image title) tags
- Using keywords within content/page
- Using keywords in meta keyword tag
- Use sitemaps

Negative:
- Using lots of images
- Using flash
- Stuffing your content with your keyword, under 5% (yeah I removed 15%, was advised it’s way too too much) is good.

Things that aren’t important but people tend to gossip that they are
- Font used
- xHTML validation
- Using keyword in meta description tag

Presumably good things (didn’t test them)
- Using H1, H2 tags for your primary keyword
- Having a clean tableless CSS design

These are on-page seo factors that I have discovered so far. I will soon post my SEO checklist for the linking factors.

I have been doing some experiments on my gadget review blog lately (which is run on WordPress) and here’s what I discovered:

1) Never allow search engines to index your tag/archive/category pages. My rankings dropped dramatically since I allowed that and from 2k unique visits from Big G I’m now receiving barely 200.

2) Do not use the following permalink structure: blogurl.com/category/postname/; I used it and my rankings fell even more.

3) Enable “Show full post” in wp options, don’t make it show a brief of the article then a “Read the full article” link. Search engines sometimes treat is as duplicate content

4) Do NOT create tags. Even if you make search engines disallow them, if one was already indexed, it’s too late. NEVER create tag pages, I will always remember this mistake. It still costs me lots of visitors.

That’s about all I discovered so far.

The guides at about.com are looking for what they call deep links. This may not necessarily be your homepage, but rather an article that you have written from an “expert” point of view.
Your best plan of attack is to:

•Pick an “about” category that suits your site.
•Submit an article that you have written on one of your domain pages.
•Offer a link back. Put a link to their site even before contacting them and said, “I find your site such a great resource that I’ve listed you in our links page.

As you can see becoming completely search engine optimized can be a great deal of work. Your success level might depend on the number of hours you are willing to put into writing search engine optimized words, titles and metatags and the amount of care that you are willing to put into the process of search engine submission. Why are you doing all this again? It is because getting listed in these directories can boost your rankings in Google and other search engine directories!