DAN STORM

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The TITLE element

I would say that the most important factor in SEO—with the possible exception of keyword density—is proper use of the TITLE element. From my experience, a short, simple title can be very effective in SEO. Type "kierkegaard" into Google and you will see that my site ranks very high—generally in fourth through sixth place. However, there is a very old, simple, and stale site on Kierkegaard that ranks third. I surmise that the high ranking is due partly to longevity, but more due to the title having an exact match with the search criteria, whereas my site has a much longer title. I have elected not to shorten it, since it would not be explicit enough. A good title also helps users when they bookmark your site.

Keyword Density, Keyword Stuffing, Duplicate Material, Natural Language, and Type of Subject Matter

Keyword Density is one of the most important aspects to higher rankings. Generally SEO experts say that a keyword needs to appear in the text roughly 2%-7% of the time depending upon the method of calculation. If a word occurs too infrequently search engines will assume that the word is not too important in that context. If the word appears too often, a search engine may assume that the site is stuffing keywords—meaning artificially multiplying instances of keywords in order to gain ranking. Keyword Stuffing especially penalizes a site if the words do not appear in natural language, but rather are in list or table form.

I check the rankings of my sites regularly. Once I noted that one of my sites fell off the rankings entirely. I went to the site and found that someone had hacked into the homepage and added hundreds of seemingly random keywords with links. I removed them and contacted my host provider to help cleans things out. Within a few days my site had assumed its old ranking. From this I derive that Google must take the possibility of hacking into account. Perhaps longevity helped me. Moreover, within a few says I got hacked into again, with the same results—a huge drop in rankings. I changed hosts and found that my site was ranked high again within a week.

Duplicate material, and especially duplicate pages should be avoided. Search engines will penalize you as if you are stuffing keywords. If you find that you have two or more duplicate pages, it is best to label one as canonical and put redirects to it on the others.

The type of keyword matters too. The more obscure a word, the more easily a site will rank high which uses that keyword. There are many web pages about Kierkegaard, but there are millions of web pages that use a word like "book" or "computer". My site ranks high in large measure due to the topic that I have chosen.

Domains, Subdomains, Directories, and Filenames

Keywords can be used in the domain, subdomain, a directory or the file name itself. It is generally agreed that the following example is not a good URL for SEO.

These are better URLs.

It is often assumed that a keyword in a link has more SEO impact than otherwise, and varies slightly in impact as to whether it is an internal or external link.

SEOMOZ.org has compiled a list of ranking factors of keywords placement.

Meta Keywords

Just do a search on "SEO myths" and you'll see this topic come up. The conventional wisdom is don't waste your time on meta tags, except for the meta description tag which Google uses. However, Google is not the only search engine. Yahoo seems to use meta keywords, and there is no reason to assume that Google will never change its policy. Moreover, it is relatively easy to insert them, so why not?

Keywords in Specific Tags

Keywords that appear in the alt attribute of an image, in a list (LI element) or marked as bold or strong (B or STRONG element) are considered to increase SEO marginally. Again, since I believe that developers need to think holistically, white hat SEO and good development means that we use HTML semantics correctly. Do not put anything in an ordered list (OL element) or unordered list (UL element) unless it belongs in a list. Do not use alt attributes too freely, since they are intended to provide alternative text to users who are visually impaired or to users who choose to browse without viewing images in order to speed up page load. Alt text should generally repeat the text on the image. See my Accessibility Developer Guide for more on the alt attribute.

I would encourage you never to use the B element since it is a physical rather than logical tag. Use the STRONG element and/or CSS styling to convey bold text. Again, think holistically. Good CSS means separating style from content. Good accessibility means not thinking only of visual browsers. (What would "bold" mean to a blind person anyway? Whereas "strong" means something to everyone.) Lastly, good SEO means not artificially pumping up content.

Heading Tags

It is often alleged that putting keywords in heading tags (h1 through h6) will increase SEO. However, a search for SEO myths may report that there is little or no benefit to this practice. I say that even if that is true, we should continue to use heading tags because they certainly help accessibility, especially as visually impaired users can scan a page, depending on the screen reader, which can go from heading to heading. Semantic Diversity, as I call it, benefits accessibility and makes CSS easier to apply.

Flash

To state the obvious, Flash content is invisible to search engines. Moreover, Flash is fast going the way of the dodo, except for video, so this might not be a concern.

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