After doing a lot of reading recently, and seeing a lot of differences in opinion, I've finally come up with what I'm going to use as my 10
SEO commandments from now on, or until i change my mind. Before I inscribe them in to my forehead would anyone like to argue any of them, or include another? Hell, I see no reason why I can't have 11 commandments.
1. Link popularity. Increasing incoming links increases importance. Not all links are equal. Incoming links do not harm you, outgoing links can. Links should be from and to sites of similar content/interest.
2. Anchor text. Links pointing to you, both internal and external should have keywords relevant to the destination URL included in the anchor text.
It seems to be general opinion that text links hold more weight than image links, irrelevant of whether alt tags have been used. Links should not be Javascript based as spiders can't/wont follow them.
3. Title. Titles should be brief yet descriptive, and should include your main keyword/s for the page. Words should not be repeated. Each page should have an individual title.
4. Meta Keywords. Not always used by SEs, but you should include them anyway.
Your keywords should be listed in order of importance, and should not be repeated. Each page should have an individual set of keywords.
Some SE's use stemming and will see 'car' and 'cars' as the same word, others do not.
Keywords are normally separated by a comma, but there are some who do not use the commas stating it allows for a wider selection of possible keywords. I've seen no negative affects on any site doing so.
5. Page keywords. Your keywords should also be used within your main text (you should definitely have some 'main text'). You should be conscious of the density of your keywords. Many sites with good ranks have the rule of 5-7%.
6. H Tags. H tags are used to tag headers and subheaders. H1 denotes main title, where as H6 denotes a minor sub heading. H tags should be used for the purpose of headers, rather than whole paragraphs of text. H tags should contain major keywords for the page.
7. Domain names & page names. Domain names should contain keywords relative to the general theme of the site. To be used to advantage each keyword needs to be seperated by a '-' so for the keywords 'blue widgets' you would buy 'blue-widgets.com' not 'bluewidgets.com'. Page names should follow the same rules based on the individual page content.
8. Domain Extensions. Country specific domain extensions should only be used when the content of the site is also specific to that country. If you have an international service then you should have an international domain extension.
Some SE's decline free subdomain listings.
9. 404 Page. If you rename, move or remove a page create a custom 404 page that holds real content relevent to the theme of the site, and quick links to your most important pages. This will stop you from losing visitors while the new page is indexed, and keep the old page listed for ages. Do not use meta redirects, or if you do set the delay to at least 8 seconds and include a text link to the destination URL.
10. Spamming. Do not try to increase your sites rank unnaturally. At least unless you really know what you're doing, or you don't mind being dropped for a few months at a time.
Linear Mode
