What about those sites above mine in the rankings that use spam techniques?Yes it's true that you will see sites above yours in the search engine results pages that have used questionable techniques to get there. This is a short term phenomenon! Those sites are usually crushed by the search engines at the next update. You can afford to be smug if you see those sorts of sites above yours - because when they get kicked out of the index for doing the wrong thing, your site will be there ready to move up a few more places! Remember, our watchword when doing SEO is patience, we can afford to smile because we know our sites will eventually prevail.
Linking out from your site
Who you link to tells a search engine alot about your site. Outgoing links are very important because they can help you recommend your visitors to more resources. Visitors appreciate being helped, so this is a good strategy to have on your website. The only problem is that search engines don't like you linking to 'bad neighborhoods'. 'Bad neighborhoods' are low quality sites which may tarnish your website. Avoid these like the plague. Try and link to only good quality sites which are relevant to your site. The better the sites you link to, the more favourably search engines look upon your site.
Paid links
From an SEO point of view these are bad news. Paid links should only be used to get traffic. Search engines don't like paid links that pretend to be a 'vote' for your website. If you pay for a link, ask the linking site to add rel="nofollow" to the link which tells the search engines not to count it as a 'vote'.
Duplicate Pages
Some people will tell you there is some sort of penalty if you have 2 pages the same on your website. Duplicate pages are where the URL is different but the content on the pages is too similar or exactly the same. For instance, http://www.google.com and http://www.google.com.in are nearly identical, even though they have different URLs. Typically a search engine will look at those two pages and decide they are both similar, and display only one. There is no penalty as the searcher finds what they are looking for anyway. The problem comes when there are links (or 'votes') to both pages. That means the 'votes' are split and the information is seen as less important than it really is. For this reason it is usually best to avoid duplicate pages from the start. If you already have duplicate pages, it is best to do a 301 redirect back to one.
What is PR? Is it important?
PR stands for PageRank, Google's system of rating webpages. You can check PR of pages but the tools available show outdated information and are not really relevant. PR plays less of a role in search engine placement these days and you really shouldn't worry about it. Far more important is making good content and getting good incoming links to your site.
www vs. no www
Some search engines have a problem with www and non www. What this basically means is that they think there is one website at http://example.com and another website at http://www.example.com. Of course this is a silly concept for humans but a challenge for automated search robots. Always point internal links to either one or the other for your site. Of course there are people who will link to you the opposite way.
Dynamic URLs
Do you have a dynamic site? Dynamic URLs have a ? in them with a few parameters after the ?. Check to see if dynamic URLs are generated for your site by using a spider simulator on your site. If so, you will need to get rid of those session URLs for spiders! This can be quite complicated and depends on what type of server and software you are using, but you can start your research here and here.
Once you get rid of session ID's, dynamic URL's are indexed and ranked on Google quite well. MSN and Yahoo still have problems indexing those pages. Overall, if you have the skill or you can find someone to help you do it, it is better to convert dynamic URLs to static URLs. This gives you a better chance of being indexed by all search engines.
Photos and Images
For all photos and images on your pages, make sure they are not too large. It is best to resize them in an imaging program to their finished size before inserting them in your webpage and uploading them to your site. Make sure all images have an
The robots.txt file
A good robots.txt file is like an invitation for search engine crawlers to check out your site. It is also useful for stopping some crawlers. For example, I used to despair because I was using way too much bandwith on my webserver account for one of my sites. The main reason too much bandwith was being used was because the Google Image crawler was visiting my site a couple of times a month and downloading the thousands of product images we had. Now, there is no reason for my thousands of product images to be on Google search, these are well known products and people were just looking for images to steal to put on their own websites anyway. The solution? I blocked the Google Imagebot from my site using the robots.txt file. This saves many gigabytes of bandwith every month. The robots.txt file is useful for several SEO purposes - for example stopping search engines from indexing irrelevant content .
