SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something that we should each be aware of and work toward — obsessively not — toward yes.
Here are a list of things that help, and a list of things that hurt:
Things that help:
- Keywords in your website address (URL)
- Keywords in all your page <title> tags
- Keywords in link text of internal links.
- Keywords in link text of inbound links (external links leading to your site.)
- Keywords in link text of outbound links (your links to other people’s webpages.
- Keywords in <h1> & <h2> headings
- Keywords at the top of the page (in the beginning of your text)
- Keywords in image <alt> tags
- Where inbound links come from.
- Links from sites similar to yours
- Description Metatag
- Unique content for each page of your website
- Frequent change or addition of content
- Site Accessibility
- Sitemap (html or xml)
Things that do NOT help:
- Keyword spamming & stuffing
- Keyword dilution (optimizing too many keywords)
- Hidden links (such as 1px image links)
- Deliberate Cross-linking
- Duplicate content (10 pages of the same stuff does not make your site look bigger)
- Doorway pages (
- Serving search engine different page than public
- Invisible text (too small to read or color same as background)
- Stolen Content
- Flash
- Frames
- Redirects (301 and 302)
- Telling robots to go jump in the lake (robots.txt bans)
- Dynamic pages with session IDs