SEO on-page criteria by Nico Steiner

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Title
Description
Keywords
Meta-Robots
Headlines
Content
Domain
Path
Markup
WPO
Starter Guide

The SenSEO rules try to follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Furthermore there were lots of other trustful sources analyzed.

General Information

First of all it is important to know how to deal with SEO.

Google says:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

So please keep this in mind whenever you try to push your site in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and do SEO moderately.

Use Title-Tag correctly

The Title-Tag is quite important for SEO. This tag should be unique for each webpage. Put your main keywords at the beginning followed by the category. Put the brand of your company at the end. The title should not be longer than 65 characters. This is the maximum length displayed in SERPs.

TITLE tags and ALT attributes

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources (german version)

Title is shown in title bar and browser tab.^[1]
Is prominently shown in the SERPs.^[1]
Often title is used as anchor text (e.g. from Social Media Sites).^[1]
A maximum of 65-70 characters are shown in the SERPs.^[1][2]
Place your keywords at the beginning of the title.^[1][2]
Use a divider to seperate different sections.^[2]
Place a well-known brand at the beginning, an unknown brand at the end.^[1][2]
A good title encourages for clicking it.^[1]
Key-factors for a title are clickthrough and conversions rate.^[2]
Make sure your title structure ist consistent.^[2]
Repeat your title in the <h1> heading element.^[2]
Search phrases were highlighted in the SERP snippet.^[3]
If your title is missing or inappropriate in some case, Google creates its own title text.^[3]
Title should be unique for every single page.^[4]

Use Meta-Description correctly

The Meta-Description is used as a Snippet in SERPs. It's maximum length is 150-160 characters. More characters are cut off. If possible put your keywords at the beginning.

Meta tags

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources (german version)

Should reflect the content of the page.^[1]
It's highly recommended to place your keywords in the description.^[1]
If your page should be found in long tail search, better use no description.^[1]
Description should be written in an promotional style.^[1][3]
A maximum of 150-160 characters are shown in the SERPs.^[1][3]
Search phrases were highlighted in the SERP snippet.^[2]
If your description is missing or inappropriate in some case, Google creates its own description text.^[2]
The description has no effect on Ranking.^[3]
Description should be unique for every single page.^[3][4]

Use Meta-Keywords correctly

In the last years, Meta-Keywords became increasingly irrelevant. You should only use keywords which can be found in the content of the page. Don't use more than 10 of them and write them all lowercase.

Meta tags

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources (german version)

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking because of too much spam.^[1]

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

Use Meta-Robots correctly

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler.

Meta robots

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources

No more facts right now.

Headline-Tags

Headlines have a strong semantic value. That's why you should place your keywords inside them. Use H1 only one time and be sure to use H2 and H3 in correct hierarchical order. H4-H6 have a weak relevance.

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources

No more facts right now.

Page-Content

The content is one of the most important SEO criteria. Each page should have a good deal of textual content, which should always be unique and of high quality. Try to place your keywords a few times in the visible content. Also be sure to use keywords in tags like <strong> and <em>. For every picture try to find a describing alt-attribut. For links use the title-attribute. For search engines this is content, too. Use the noscript-tag and noframes-tag to alternatively describe such content.

How can I create a Google-friendly site?

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources

No more facts right now.

Domain

If possible place your keywords in the domain. Keywords (maximum 2-3) should be seperated by hyphens. Remember that you have to communicate the domain, so try to keep it as short as possible. Don't use IDN-Domains (domains with special characters). "Older is better": Search engines admit old domains greater value.

Creating a Google-friendly URL structure

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources

No more facts right now.

Path

Use canonical URLs (only one URL per page), that prevents duplicate content. If you have more than one URL for one page, redirect them with 301 redirect to one URL. Dont't place session-data in your URL. Instead try to keep your session cookie based. Dont't nest your documents too much. The higher the directory level the more relvance the document has.

Creating a Google-friendly URL structure Dynamic pages

What says Matt Cutts?

More facts and sources

No more facts right now.

Make sure your code is semantic and valid

To make sure that the content of pages is indexed correctly keep their code valid. Semantic code has a great influence, because search engines have to analyze pages by algorithm and that's why they dependent on a good semantical structure.

To validate your documents you can use the W3C Markup Validation Service or you can use Firefox Extension HTML Validator.

Making sure your site appears properly in different browsers