ConX-2-U

Google Ranking Factor Checklist

1. Positive Page Related Rules/Factors
2. Negative Page Related Rules/Factors

The below SEO Rules listed in the following pages are not listed by weight or by relevance.

The term "Keyword" refers to the "Keyword Phrase", which can be one word or more words.

The first rule is to know what keywords people are looking for and use those keywords throughout your website. ( For keyword selection try Google Ad Words - Google Trends ).

The use of hyphens counts.

First word is best, second is second best, etc.
You can use hyphenated filenames, but keep it to two or three hyphens only.

Title tag should be 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.

Provides theme for page. Keep to less than 200 chars.
Google no longer relies upon this tag, but will often use it as do other search engines.

• Shows theme - less than 10 words.
• Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance.
• No single word should appear more than twice. If not, it may be considered spam.

5 - 20% - (all keywords divided by total words in article)*
Over use of a keyword can bring a negative result- just try to use the words in a natural way.

1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words)

Use Hx font style tags appropriately

Strong is treated the same as bold, italic is treated the same as emphasis.

Use the words in a phrase, eg. directly adjacent is best.

Does word order in the page match word order in the query?
Try to anticipate query, and match word order.

Using the word in the early part of the article is better than in the middle or the end.

Keyword Stemming is taking the stem of a word, and building additional words by adding a prefix or suffix and using pluralization:

Stem, stems, stemmed, stemmer, stemming, stemmist, stemification

You should use the Alt Text tag to describe ALL graphics. This will help with normal searches, and definitely help with image searches!

The filename linked to should contain the keywords.
Note: you should validate all links. Use a free link checker.

Try for two clicks to any page - no page deeper than 4 clicks

Appropriate links between lower-level pages

Link only to good sites. Do not link to link farms.

Should be on topic, descriptive

Avoid "Link Churn"

Links can and do go bad which can then result in site demotion. Validate all links periodically.

Too many links can easily make your website look like a "link farm" which will result in a site demotion. A good rule of thumb for a typical company site is no more than 100 outgoing links. Larger sites can do with more links.

.gov sites seem to be the highest status
.edu sites seem to be given a high status
.org sites seem to be given a high status
.com sites excel in encompassing all the spam/ crud sites, resulting in the need for the highest scrutiny/ action by the search engines.

Try not to exceed 100K page size. Better to have lots of smaller pages then a few large pages; however, use common sense and don't cut your pages up too small either.

Use hyphens rather than a "_" or "." Limit hyphens to 1 or 2, too many hyphens can be bad.

Search engines, like users, like fresh pages. So update your articles periodically- when it makes sense.

Ratio of old pages to new pages. Having fresh content is good, old content does not hurt, a good ratio is best.

Active websites are more attractive to some search engines.

It is always best to keep the URL length small, and hopefully easy to read (at least for human eyes). The less characters the best, but as a general rule never go over 100.

Larger sites are presumed to be better funded, better organized, better constructed, and therefore better sites; however, search engines are also looking at content and they will avoid large "spam sites" that contain either computer generated, duplicate pages, or sites that contain copies of content found elsewhere.

Even in the internet age, the older you get the more respect you are given.

Newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition.

Too much of a good thing.....

Targeting too many unrelated keywords on a page, which would detract from theming, and reduce the importance of your REALLY important keywords.

This should be obvious, but no text = no keywords and is therefore invisible to search engines.

Google in particular went after cookie-cutter affiliate sites with a vengeance. These were sites that had massive inter-linking, and little unique content.

Don't link to "link farm"
Periodically you should double check your links to make sure they did not go bad (some failed company sites are taken over by link farms, or even adult sites that can then effect your ranking).

Do not immediately send your visitor to another page using meta refresh.

Obvious, right? Actually in addition to the normal "bad" words you should also avoid bad phrases- even if the individual words are ok.

If you have many sites with the same web host, linking them together can indicate that you are actually one entity, and therefore the links won't count the same as if it was from an external site. Cross linking is easy to spot, and to penalize.

Stealing information from other websites is a great way of getting blacklisted.

Some search engines, most notably Google, uses multiple caches for their search engine. If a comparison between the two caches brings inconsistent results, like a completely different set of keywords, then this can effect your results.

Too frequent = bad

In addition to just being a bad user experience frames can effect your search results too.

Intentional self-exclusion.

A red flag - one reason only - a sneaky link.

This was extremely common back in the day for p0rn sites. Essentially the author makes the text the same color as the background so the viewer doesn't see it, but the search engine does. You might not get caught, but if you do it will hurt you.