SEO for Fun and Profit

SEO Summary

Search engine optimisation can be broken down into onsite and offsite factors.

Onsite Factors

• Domain age
• Domain relevance (Topics throughout site)
• Domain name relevance (keyword.com)
• Domain registration factors such as renewal date and private whois
• Site speed, page load times
• Site freshness, new daily content
• Title relevancy
• Keywords in meta description
• H1 tag relevancy
• Keyword relevancy to text content (think latent semantic indexing)
• Text content length
• Image relevancy (alt tags and actual image)
• Content freshness, updated recently?
• Duplicate content
• Internal links to page
• Sitewide external link quality (builds trust)
• Site contains privacy policy, terms, about us, sitemaps
• SSL sites using it get a slight boost in the SERPs
• Mobile optimisation

Offsite Factors

• Back links – the original and still most important part of SEO.
• Pagerank – domain trust * link profile
• Age of back link – older the better
• Relevancy of links coming in
• Site position of link, sidebar, in text, footer
• Quality of backlinks, coming from high PR sites?
• Diversity of backlinks, forums, blogs, social
• Social signals tweets, facebook likes, google+1’s etc.
• Social mentions domain name or associated brand
• 301 redirects from authority sites, used to flow domain trust and page rank
• Bounce rate, how many users search your page then return directly back to google to find what they were looking for elsewhere.
• CTR how many users click on your page in the SERP’s
• Pages & time per visit, users that like what they find stay longer
• Returning visitors, are your visitors coming back for more?

Ideal SEO content in my opinion should be roughly 2000 words+. Longer content keeps the user on the page longer, is shared more, is linked to more and generally outperforms shorter texts. It should induce a user to link to the page or share, like, tweet. Infographics, funnies, generally good content will all improve social interaction. Target a keyword phrase based on medium competition high volume phrases. You can use google adwords ad planner to find some gems. Get the keyword in the title, description, h1 tags and a couple of times throughout the body of the text. Keep the on page text relevant. Update it as required to keep it top of the serps, comments are a great way to keep content “fresh”. If you need a boost link to the content from the home page or 301 redirect some relevant expired domains to build page rank, google love, domain trust or whatever you wish to call it. Take a note of what your SERP’s look like, would you use the same text for an adwords ad? Optimise with call to actions in the description to get the best click through rate possible. Improve site structure and quality to keep users on the site for as long as possible.

Here’s some coding tips you can use to improve SEO.

Note September 2020: There’s an updated SEO cheatsheet available at

https://jamesbachini.com/resources/SEOCheatSheet.pdf

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NB. Avoid Google’s pets