SEO Blog Money

6 SEO tips for real estate websites

Frank Rui Jiang — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:35:24 +0000

Real estate SEO does seem to be a forbidden topic on many famous SEO blogs, many bloggers simply avoid talking about it whenever possible. It is understandable because real estate is one of the toughest areas to SEO for, because natural links are much harder to obtain comparing to other industries. Before move onto “how to SEO for real estate website”, lets look at some facts.

Firstly, people are interested in buying properties for investment or for own living, but only a small fraction of them are keen on building a blog and keeping writing about it. Therefore, I would say more than 95% of real estate blogs on the internet are written specific for SEO purpose.

Secondly, this industry is all about money. Unlike other industries such as IT and Education, many people work to complete their dreams. There are geeks who want to invent great online tools to serve people and there are warm-hearted teachers who want to share their love to students. I am not saying that people who work in real estate industry are bad or something, it’s just they know very well how competitive this industry is and under normal circumstances they cannot cooperate with competitors. Whenever you contact the webmaster of a relevant website for a link, they either don’t reply or they will forward you a quote. If you have time to check backlinks of those top ranked realtor websites, you will know how unusual it is if any of them has a large number of natural links from related websites.

Lastly, apart from talking about increasing/decreasing of property prices and how investors gain/lost their confidence, there aren’t many news to be generated within this industry. Take one of our clients, Reflex Solutions (who offers serviced office in London), as an example, there weren’t many news recently about London office rental. If you type the search query in Google news, you can even find pieces of news which have been published one month ago.

However, it’s a challenge for us, especially if your client is not a big brand in real estate industry. We have to think different approaches to achieve our goals, and that will be the only way to succeed. Now, we will go through all SEO tips for real estate website that I can think of. Please note, it’s not a full list, you can always come up other great ideas, make sure to share them with us.

1. Content, more content

A website is nothing if there is no content, this rule applies to every single website. We all know how difficult it is to get links for a real estate website, so the first step is to enrich the content. Adding more content to the website doesn’t not only mean that you can rank for more long-tail keywords, but also mean that you are sending a clear signal to search engines to let them know your website is very proactive.

2. Target main keywords on homepage

Don’t even think about distribute your main keywords (even if there is more than ten of them) to different sub-pages, it’s not gonna work. Think about this, it’s extremely hard to achieve links for your homepage already, and you want to have the same amount of links for each individual page? This could only happen in dreams or you owns wikipedia. Google always assigns more authorities to a root domain than a sub-page, you should obey this rule unless Google changes its algorithms fundamentally. You might worry about the space on homepage is not enough for, lets say, 10 keywords, there are several options to resolve this.

Simply add more space. You need to make sure “call-to-actions” are above the fold, then you can always add more content underneath to provide more information for both visitors and search engines
Use tabs to save space. If you really don’t to have a long page, then you break content into different tabs. A real person has to click on each tab to read different part of content, but search engines will see all content as a whole. Here is a great example about this technology, Solarcentury. (a leading solar panel supplier in the UK)
Anchor text distribution. If you cannot be bothered to add any extra content, here is your solution. While building links, always using different core keywords as anchor texts. You need to do the same for two options above, but since there is no exact keyword in the content, you will have to spend extra effort not wasting any chance to optimise anchor texts.

3. It’s all about local SEO

A buyer who is interested in buying residential property in London won’t type “buy a house” in as a search query. Instead, he/she will type “buy a house in London”, “house prices in London”…etc. Always make sure to implement best practices of local SEO, I strongly recommend you checking David Mihm’s Blog and his local SEO checklist.

4. Article distribution

Article distribution, an ancient SEO technique which has been widely used since few years ago. Surely it’s not as effective as it used to be, but links are links, something is better than nothing. Don’t publish an article to a large number of content distributors before tweak the words, because search engines can easily detect duplicated content and deduct their values. It’s a kind of “grey-hat” SEO, if you have sufficient budget, you can always spend them on more unique articles without having to worry about the tweaking job.

5. Blog something that is too cool not to be shared

Simple words: a killer post. Instead of begging or paying for links, why don’t invest some time to conduct a killer article which is too cool not to get links. Links from real estate websites are great, but they are nearly impossible to get. Why not getting some links from other websites, link diversity is proved to be very effective on improving your website’s ranking.

Sometimes a killer post can be simple. For example, most of people are curious about the things that they are unaware of, and certainly they want to know what Google’s offices look like. If Reflex Solutions can take some photos inside of HQ of HSBC in Canarf Wharf, I am pretty sure someone will link to it.

If you have graphic design skills and are willing to spend a decent amount of time on researching, then an info-graphic is a great choice for link baiting.

It’s all about creativity and show people something that they want to share.

6. Buying links

The definition of buying links here is to buy the traffic rather than game the search engines. It’s actually quite funny, if I say I buy links to game search engines, then I am a deep dark black hat SEOer and I am a bad person; If I say I buy links for the traffics, then I am ethical, despite these links will improve my site’s ranking positions as long as there isn’t “nofollow” tag. (Even if there is one, Matt Cutts said Google removed its effects about a year ago… who knows). If your you have enough budget, you can always approach websites such as charity website, blog to sponsor them. It will bring a lot of traffics and you cannot say these visitors won’t become potential buyers, meanwhile, your ranking positions are likely to be improved due to the fact that these links are passing authorities.

However, there is one thing to notice, never sponsor any website that looks spammy. (I once saw a website recover all its ranking position by removing a sponsor link on a “spammy-look” website) So I would recommend sponsoring charity, school events, university events…etc, these sort of websites are trusted by search engines.

A non-SEO tip

Never hesitate to leave comments in blogs and forums, these comments are great at getting traffics even though they can barely impact your SEO. You will never know if a comment can bring you some business unless you get it posted.

Real Estate is definitely the most difficult SEO area I have ever been, and hopefully these tips can help you.

How to NOT miss link building opportunities when you have a press release

Frank Rui Jiang — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:01:58 +0000

Many companies publish press releases on a regular basis to increase their brand-awarenesses, and nearly every SEOer knows this is a great opportunity to get a bunch of links from PR websites. But links from popular PR sites are not as worthwhile as they were few years ago, this is because search engines realised that more and more SEOers use press release website as a link building weapon.

There is a great linking opportunity lying there and it is waiting for you to pick it up. As we know, journalists are surfing around internet to find news resources and bloggers are searching through the web for their next blog post. If your press release is interesting enough, then it is highly like to be picked up by journalists and bloggers. But do you know that they often don’t give a link? Either they forgot about it, or they’ve been so lazy to embed a link, or they had whatever reasons, the truth is, there is no link!

Why are these links so important that you cannot afford to miss?

1. They are not linking from PR sites, so you don’t have to worry about the quality of links to be deducted.

2. Bloggers and journalists will rewrite the press release article in their own words, at least they will tweak it. Do you have time to tweak a press release? Imagine you need to publish it on 20 different PR websites. You know the difference between when Google finds 10 links embedded in 10 duplicated articles and when it finds 10 links in 10 different articles.

3. Relevancy, most of bloggers only grab news and articles that match to their topics. So if they give you a link, it will be a relevant link which will greatly help your website.

4. Never forget about the traffics these links will bring to you. On press release sites, journalists will read your article, but will they be interested in your company’s products? I don’t think so. But some visitors of their websites do.

Now you may ask “how do I know that bloggers and journalists didn’t place a link to my website? I thought they are friendly and responsible, and adding a link is a 2-seconds work for them right?” Let me prove it to you, many people just don’t bother doing this 2-second job, and you should persuade them, otherwise you just miss this great chance to have extra links.

Solarcentury, one of our SEO clients, is one of the largest solar energy company in the UK. They recently worked with GE to help schools generate money from solar PV panels, therefore they published a press release about it. It is an interesting story, because now people know they can actually earn the money from installing a solar panel, thanks to government’s solar feed-in tariff.

Here comes the interesting part, how to find these news posts and blog posts. Use Google web and Google news, by searching brand name or relevant keywords. In this case, I typed in “solarcentury” in Google news and “solarcentury ge” in Google web, and surely I digged out some chances to build quality links.

Above spreadsheet (you can find download in this article)shows some of the articles that does NOT have a link pointing back to Solarcentury, so what we need to do next is to simply contact the webmasters to ask for links.

Remember, when you start reaching to these webmasters, use your client’s company Email address (ask them to create one for you) because it looks trustworthy. In this case, I sent an email to Solarcentury and asked for an email address, I will never use my address at Risedigital. Otherwise, webmasters will think, why the hell should I do the favor for you, you are not from Solarcentury.

This link building method does not only apply to this “press release” case, you should often search your brand term on search engines, the result will surprise you! Never ever let link building opportunities bypass you

Did natural link baiting die?

Frank Rui Jiang — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:03:09 +0000

Few days ago I read a post on wolf howl called “I listened to Google and I failed”. In the article, the author (Darko) claimed he did not believe that great content would earn inbound links naturally anymore because his posts were very popular on social network, but hundreds of thousands of views on stumbleupon didn’t bring him a lot of links.

(Great chart, special thanks to elliance.com)

No doubt that internet is very different than 10 years ago. In the good old days, you could probably just write about something funny or useful and visitors would give you a link as they were unaware of the value of a link (because Google was not very popular yet). This barely happens today, unless you can provide something not only valuable but also viral linkbaiting. Nowadays people can’t be careless to give links because the information on internet is over-saturated and they know the value of a link. (Thanks to Google)

There is a huge difference between valuable content and viral linkbaiting content. A valuable content might not be viral linkbaiting, but a viral linkbaiting content must be valuable.

Surely Darko’s “what’s the average stumbleupon user like” is useful as it shows some pretty data of stumbleupon users who came to his website, and indeed he put a lot of efforts to analyse this data. So this article became very popular on stumbleupon (113K views so far), it is interesting enough for a “stumbleupon”. But does it viral enough to deserve a link from everybody?

Let’s have a look at this post

Data: it’s collected from his website, the data of 90K visitors is a small fraction of overall stumbleupon users. People are probably not very interested in a small fraction but the entire pie.

Inspiration: what inspirations can we get from this post?

Linkability: OK, I find out this is a quality post and decide to give a link, but wait a minute, where is the link? It ‘s partially showing in the address bar (stumbleupon doesn’t make it easy shareable).

Effort: How much effort did this post take to be done? (Not saying the author didn’t put effort into the post, but reader’s standard is really really high these days)

Now let’s take a look at another post, “how does google work” by ppcblog.

Infographic by PPC Blog

Data: the most accurate infograph published so far about how google crawls, indexes and ranks, extremely informative.

Inspiration: To me, it inspires me how an info graph can be extremely viral that attracts thousands of links within few days. To everybody else, it could be “how complicated Google is”, “ohhh, so this is the mechanics of Google”…etc

Linkability: Two pieces of code that you can embed this graph on your website, one for small version and one for large version.

Effort: Years of experience and researches plus nice graphic design skills.

Finally, let’s compare the search presence of two posts.

“What’s the average stumbleupon user like”

“How does Google work”

It’s currently ranking at 4th position on Google for “how does google work”. (personalisation turned off)

So does link baiting really not work anymore? You can see the results from images above, and yes, it still works, but not as easy as few years ago. It’s not about whether you should listen to google’s recommendation; it’s all about whether you can create something unique and viral that people HAVE to give you a link. If you can create something that has viral linkability like this infograph does, I bet you don’t have to spend much time on promoting it because other people will do the job for you, FOR FREE.

Tip: If you think designing an infograph is time consuming, you can always pay developers to build some widgets for viral linking. Take an example, imagine a solar energy company created a small widgets that can calculate how much electricity you’ve been saved, wouldn’t it be very fun to deserve a link?

World Cup – Argentina 0:4 WON Germany

Frank Rui Jiang — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:39:47 +0000

Is this post anything to do with SEO? Sorry mate, No.

It’s about world cup, it’s about the game between Argentina and Germany which just ended.

OK, but are you crazy? Argentina 0:4 WON germany? Yes, I am not crazy, I have evidence xD

Although Argentina lost 4 goals against Germany, which was a humiliation, BUT…….. at least they went through to the next level……. on FIFA website.

Well, I don’t think the webmaster of FIFA website is a fan of Germany team

Click through data now available in Google Webmaster Tools

Why beg for a link? Offer a link! Link building by using viral widgets

Frank Rui Jiang — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:02:43 +0000

In the SEO circle, people talk about link building. No doubt that many SEOer complain about the difficulty to build quality links, it takes so much efforts, and human relationships often gets involved (humans always make things complicated, don’t we?). How many times you were getting frustrated because you sent hundreds and hundreds of emails out for a link and never got replied? Even though it’s a 3-minutes job for them.

Humans are lazy because we are designed to be highly intelligent, and this is why humans are taking advantages of get paid for implementing a link or they will never bother. So in order to get links from them, we need to approach them in a different way – instead of begging for a link, offering them a link.

So am I encouraging buying links or something? Answer is NO, I am not asking you to buy a link. Why should you give the money away? You should invest them on your own site!

Let me put you into this situation, you have $1000 budget for building links, would you pay blog owners or website owners $20 each for 50 links? Or would you rather spend these $1000 to design an interesting widget and offer this widget to blog and website owners for free?

We have a client who offers hypnosis service to stop people smoking (stop smoking hypnotherapy), they have link building budgets for us to do the job. I searched online for some potential linking opportunities and I found that quite a few people are blogging about their experience of quitting smoking. They are enthusiastic to share the results with other people who are trying to stop smoking, and they keep blogging as this is a great way to prevent from smoking again. So instead of asking (maybe even paying) them for a link, why don’t I ask our developers to build a widget to count how many days they’ve stopped smoking? The development work barely costs us few hundred quids and I bet bloggers (who quitted smoking or who is going to) will love it if I offer this widgets to them.

Link building becomes not that hard once your website is famous or you can offer something funny or useful to other website owners. Although purchasing link is definitely working, and it’s probably the easiest way of getting links (you get money you get everything). But in the end of the day, you will get caught by search engines, and most importantly, you are not spending money to improve your own website, you are paying others to game the search engines.

Please bear in your mind, while you are enjoying the success from viral widget, don’t forget to get links from other channels. Link diversity is extremely important, and you will pay if you over-do widget bait link building.

Click through data now available in Google Webmaster Tools

Frank Rui Jiang — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:20:20 +0000

Google webmaster tool is one the best tools to see your website’s online presence, now it’s even better! Google Webmaster Tools just launched it’s latest feature, for webmasters, to see comprehensive click through data.

It’s also great from SEO perspective to monitor the click through from different ranking positions. As ranking positions fluctuate, Google Webmaster Tools will collect data and calculate the click through for you. So we will be able to know if No.1 position is really the best for our website.

But I see some problems with the data, isn’t data so similar to our friend – Google Adwords Keyword Tool’s data? This means the data is not that specific to your keywords, it’s very likely to be estimated in a large scale. Well, it’s better than nothing isn’t it? Stay close with your Google Analytics, compare data between Google Analytics and Google Webmasters, and you will find something useful.

Here is a screenshot from my personal interesting blog – starcraft 2 blog (I am a Blizzard fan )

I am still very cautious about how accurate these data is, so use it carefully. This is my 2 cents.

SEOmoz launched new keyword difficulty tool

Frank Rui Jiang — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:04:35 +0000

There are quite few of keyword difficulty tools on the market, but only few of them analyse a keyword as complex as SEOmoz, especially they are mainly developed for the US market. Now, I don’t have to struggle with keyword analysis on Google UK anymore! After months and months waiting, SEOmoz finally launched their new keyword difficulty tool.

The screenshot is taken from the Email that SEOmoz sent to me, though they haven’t officially announced it yet. I simply cannot wait to test it, and here are the results (Improvements comparing to old version).

Multiple keywords analysing

In the old version, only one keyword can be analysed at a time. It’s OK if you just need to analyse 5 keywords, but how about 50? Take ages to finish them. Now with the new version, you can analyse up to 5 keywords at the same time!

Speed of analysing

It used to take around 1-3 minites to analyse each keyword, it’s extremely time consuming if I have many keywords. But now, it takes less than 10 secends! I did a test to search “web design hertfordshire“, it took 4 seconds only.

Analyse keywords on different Google TLDs

This is what I am really happy about, it used to analyse keywords on google.com, and that’s fine for the US users. For me, that was a disaster, I had to manually compare the SERP and estimate the competition.

Monthly search volume

Absolutely brilliant, I don’t have to open a new tab for Google Adwords anymore because the tool will pull the search volume data from Google Adwords. (Both broad match and exact match)

Intuitive comparison for top 10 ranking web pages

Nicely designed chart with data of Domain Authority and Page Authority for top 10 results on SERP.

Link metrics for top 10 ranking web pages

Linking room domains will give you a brief idea of how competitive the keyword is, it saves your time from opening other backlink analysis tools.

Summary

The new version of SEOmoz keyword difficulty is much better than the previous one, as it provides more intuitive data, runs faster and thus saves a lot of time.

Recommendation

Keyword difficulty score seems to be using more advanced algorithm thus changed a lot comparing to old version, it would be great if SEOmoz can place a link of technical aspects on keyword difficulty tool page.

Example link building record sheet

Frank Rui Jiang — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:44:11 +0000

Link building is generally acknowledged as one of the most difficult SEO tasks. Not only because it is very hard to accurately measure the quality of a link, but also it involves the complicated human relationships.

As often you work really hard on getting a link but walk away with nothing, it’s really important to improve the productivity of this process.

Here is the link building record sheet I designed, it’s suitable for low to medium level SEOers who sometimes struggle with the efficiency of link building process. For high-end SEOer, I am pretty sure they have their own secret spreadsheet to complete this job.

The image above is the spreadsheet that I created, it’s quite simple but very intuitive. You can find download links in the end of article for both Excel 2003 and 2007.

The metrics in this link building recording sheet including

Link URL

You have to record down link not just for keeping but also for checking in the future

Anchor Text

It’s very important to check the anchor text of a link, whether it’s missing, desired keyword or variations. Beware of too many links with desired anchor texts, Google can discount these links.

Type

It’s necessary to obtain different types of links, diversity is a key to link building. In this spreadsheet, it’s easy to check link types.

Followed

Matt Cutts claimed nofollowed is no longer working for the purpose of PageRank Sculpting, but I recommend checking it, as I haven’t seen any test that can completely deny the effect of nofollow tag.

Note: place “1″ you will get a tick, place “0″ you will get a cross, do not place any other numbers.

mR, mT, DmR, DmT

This is an algorithm created by SEOmoz for its tool “Linkscape” to determine the importance of a page and its domain. mR is moz Rank, mT is mozTrust, DmR is Domian moz Rank and DmT is Domain moz Trust. You can find full explanation of metrics here.

Note: Linkscape is only available to premium member of SEOmoz, so for those who haven’t subscribed a membership. I recommend changing these 4 metrics to Page Authority and Domain Authority, which can be determined by OpenSiteExplorer (Free).

Outlinks

This metrics means the number of external links a page links out, I am just saving spaces so I called it outlinks. The more outlinks a page has, the less link juice your website will receive. Especially if a “not-so-famous” page contains hundreds of outbound links to other domains, it’s pretty suspicious and Google will probably discount the value of these links.

Obtained

This keeps you working hard on chasing links

Note: place “1″ you will get a tick, place “0″ you will get a cross, do not place any other numbers.

Method

This determines which method is working best, you will be able to know which strategy you should use for each type of link.

Time

I am sure you understand how important to write down the time you started a mission and when you finished it. Due to lack of space in the spreadsheet, I didn’t create two colomns for time, you can always write something like “03-Mar to 20-March 2010″.

I am appreciated if you leave your comments on how this spreadsheet can be improved furthermore.

Download Excel 2007 version of link building record sheet (xlsx)

Download Excel 2003 version of link building record sheet (xls)

SEO tips for relaunching website

Frank Rui Jiang — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:11:15 +0000

It’s been a while (probably 3 weeks) that I haven’t blogged anything because I was on holiday in Spain and Portugal for 2 weeks, and this week I was busy preparing the relaunching of our company’s website. Our company is a web design company, this re-design was planned since 1 year ago, but never got it done due to huge amount of work for clients.

SEO is really important no matter if your website is in development process, in maintenance or in re-launching stage, there are many factors to be considered and checked carefully, not only for the sake of SEO, but also for your website and customers.

So here are some useful SEO tips for re-launching the website, some of them may seem obvious, but they are often overlooked.

1. Broken links

Broken links are really bad for your website, and not just because search engines don’t like them, your customers hate them too. Imagine one of customers is browsing your pages with great interest in your services, and all of sudden, he clicks a link and see a big bad 404 page. Do you think he will stay or just leave?

Can links be checked if they are broken on the local server? Yes, here is a great tool called Xenu can help you with it. It checks your website’s links within few minutes, so you don’t need to click around to find broken links on your own anymore.

Note: When uses Xenu, if you have customised 404 page, the broken links won’t be shown in red color. You can find broken links by searching for “404″ (ctrl+F).

2. Redirects

Often when a website is relaunching, there are more or less URL issues. For example, our company site used to have /page/ in every service page’s URL, now they are gone, but google already indexed them, so how to deal with it?

Answer is 301 redirect, but should you redirect every old url? It is quite controversial, many professionals think all the old urls should be redirected to the new ones, even if there isn’t any new page relevant to the old one (old pages may be redundant and some people redirect them to homepage). And some professionals (you need to be a SEOmoz pro member to see this article) don’t think it’s necessary to redirect all the old links, because Google is pretty good at identifying the broken links, so you should only redirect the important links.

I personally think only the important links need to be redirected, but how to evaluate whether a link is important or not? Evaluate a link from two aspects, 1. is it important to your customers? 2. does it receive link juices?

It’s easy to see whether it is important to your customer or not, just open your analytics account and see how many visits that particular page receives, if the number of visits is reasonable, there is no reason not to redirect the old link.

It’s harder to determine link juices a page receives, because link juices come from not only other websites, but also your internal pages. In order to check link juices which flow from other websites, you can use yahoo site explorer to see how many inbound links you have got for a particular page. To determine internal link juices, open your google webmaster account and there is an “internal links” sector for you to look into. If you are a SEOmoz pro member, “top pages tool” will get the job done for you more accurately. (internal + external)

3. Robots.txt

Check your robots.txt, the site is very possibly blocked from search engines in the design stage. DO check it!

4. On-page optimisation

It’s the best opportunity to get on-page factors updated and optimised. Title, content, keyword mapping, img alt tag…etc, do you best to optimise them for both search engines and real customers. Here is on-page optimisation checklist that you can follow.

Note: SEO is useless if your website cannot convert. (means give you REAL MONEY) Do place “call-to-action” throughout your service or product pages, and keep user experience issues in mind.

5. Web analytics and result tracking

You re-launch or re-design your website is to get better results right? Don’t be satisfied by seeing number of visits increasing or number of page views increasing. Deeply analyse web data and try to understand your customers’ behaviors, it’s the key to develop your business. Google Analytics is powerful, but it’s not powerful enough, you may also want to implement other tools to release the potential of your website such as Google Website Optimiser and Crazyegg…etc

6. Don’t re-launch your website on Friday!

I think this one is the best relaunching SEO tip, no matter how well you think you’ve done, there will be problems! Relaunch it on Monday, so your programmers have 4 working days to fix everything.

Re-launch a website means more challenges to face and more opportunities to catch, it’s a whole new start point for SEO, never stop hard working.

You can find my full SEO checklists here, some of the check points in that post will help you with re-launching the website too.

Full SEO checklist from scratch

Frank Rui Jiang — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:37:19 +0000

Every SEOer has his/her own SEO checklist, and it needs to be adjusted quite often for different types of clients. So few days ago, I decided to build this full lists on my blog, so it’s easier for me to find it anywhere anytime, and maybe it can help you as well.

I know this list is far away from perfect, and I will update it on weekly basis. Therefore, I need your help, if I made any mistake (even grammer), please point out, if you have any good point that hasn’t been in this checklist, please let me know by leaving the comments. As a return, I would love to place your link (dofollow) either in reference or contributor if you make this list better.

seo checklist

#Domain registration#

Brainstorm keywords that best describe your business

-    Find one-word or two-word terms, don’t exceed three-word

Ask yourself if your business is limited within a country or not.

-    Choose .com or .co.uk (or other tld) wisely. If you choose TLD other than .com, do buy .com as well and set up 301 redirection.

Create a unique and short domain.

-    E.g. for keyword “seo”, “seomoz.com” is 100 times better than “bestseocompany.com”

Check potential trademark infringement before you register the domain

Find local reliable hosting provider

-    If your business is within UK, then find a UK web host.

Choose between dedicated IP or shared IP

-    If you are company, make sure to use dedicated IP; if you are just having a blog, make sure to check if your IP is on the ban list

#Keyword research checklist#

Turn off personalised search

-    Personalised search may influence keywords ranking check

Write down the main services you provide

-    Some of them or all of them will be your core keywords

-    Make sure you have individual pages for each of your core keywords

Expand the keywords (10-20 for each core keyword, may expand even more in the future)

-    Find possible long-tail keywords around core keywords. E.g. for core keywords “search engine optimisation”, you may want to have long-tail keywords such as “seo checklist” and “seo ranking factors”. These topics are extremely relevant to core keywords and will benefit core keywords in the future.

Analyse the difficulties to rank these keywords

-    Use SEO tools to find out how difficult these keywords are to rank on 1st page of SERP

-    Analyse competitors to understand how strong they are in terms of on-page optimisation and global link popularity.

#Web structure checklist#

Turn off cookies and Disable JavaScript

-   You may find preference setting problems by turning off cookies

-   Check is global navigation still working after disabling JavaScript

Keep site structure flat

-    best to keep within three levels

Minimise potential page loading speed problem

-    external CSS and JavaScript minifying

Robots.txt

-    prevent googlebot from crawling some pages you don’t want google to see

Use HTML

-    Minimise the use of Ajax, iFrame, JavaScript, Flash…etc, best to avoid them

Valid HTML & CSS

-    Does not do any harm to website’s performance on search engine unless there are severe errors which affect crawling

Broken link

-    Make sure there is no broken link, especially for important pages. There is debate about

Sitemap

-    Both html version and xml version

Browser compatibility

-    Make sure website is compatible with evil IE series

Keywords mapping

-    Assign appropriate topics throughout the pages

Keyword cannibalisation

-    Be wary of keyword cannibalisation and make sure to link from subtopics to main topics. E.g. you may want to have a link back to “SEO checklist” page on “the best SEO checklist” blog entry

Short and descriptive URLs

-    It’s not always good practice to have all your keywords in your service or product page’s url, especially they are long and hard to remember. E.g. example.com/they-are-long-and-hard-to-remember, the better practice would be example.com/long. But for blog posts, it’s another story.

Internal linking

-   Set up links between pages, e.g. you offer SEO service and PPC service, if you mentioned PPC in your SEO service, do link it to PPC page.

#On-page optimisation checklist#

Keyword in title

-    Remember to put most appropriate keyword in title tag

-    Never do keyword stuffing

-    Keep your title descriptive and within 65 characters

-    The earlier position a keyword has, the more weight it will have. (But balance it wisely if your brand name has to be first)

Keyword in URL

-    As mentioned before, keep it short and descriptive

Keyword in H1

-    SEOmoz claimed that keyword in H1 is not as important as it used to be

-    H1 is intuitive to visitors to let them know what a page is about

-    Think about usability before you put keyword in H1

Keyword in content

-    Never keyword stuffing

-    Use synonyms

Keyword in image alt tag

-    Put keyword in image alt tag

Keyword in image file name

-    Both search engine and human being hate something like “ASDA2312asdas.jpg” right?

Keyword in bold

-    Keyword in bold and italic have same weight

Keyword in first 100 words

-    It’s a good practice to have the most important keyword in first 100 words, my personal experience was I couldn’t be bothered to read the whole article sometimes…

Canonical tag

-    Make sure to have a canonical tag on every important page pointing to correct url
Meta description

-    Only affect click through rate

-    Sometimes it’s better to let spider judge what to show in meta description

-    Quality links from local websites

Outbound links

-    Better not to exceed 150 outbound links

Anchor text

-   Although there is no evidence to prove anchor texts of internal links will affect ranking, but do it for the sake of web usability

#Local SEO#

Claim local business listing

-    Google local business center

-    Yahoo! Local

-    MSN local

Local data providers

-    Every country has different primary local data providers

Local business listing address in city of search

Local business listing with proper category

-    Make sure to list your company in the most appropriate category

Keyword in local business listing title

-    Never keyword stuffing

-    Keep descriptive

Keyword in local business listing description

-    Never keyword stuffing

-    Keep descriptive

Location in local business listing title

Location in local business listing description

Keyword in local business listing customer fields

-    List your main services or products

Address on every page

-    Search engine is very smart to recognise your address

-    Having address on all pages not only help search engine but also your visitors

Regular SEO process with local search in mind

-    Keyword in title

-    Keyword in content

#Link building#

Don’t build links just for link building

-    Don’t spam comments and social media profiles

-    Use comments and social media to communicate, you will get quality traffic and links in the long run
Partner

-    It’s reasonably easy to ask your partner to do you a favor and link to you

Directories

-    Premium and high quality directories such as yahoo directory and business.com

-    Niche directories

Quality content

-    Provide something useful and other websites don’t offer. Such as quality articles or even tools.
Content syndication

-    Publish compelling articles on authoritative article directories
Guest blogging

-    Many high quality blogs accept guest blogging, win-win
Widgets

-    Must be relevant to the content of the page receiving the link
Reverse engineering competitor’s link

-    One of the oldest techniques to find possible link sources

Reciprocal links

-    This is devalued since 2006, but if you have highly relevant websites to exchange links, why not, at least more potential visitors.

Comments, forums, social networks…etc

-    Most of these links are either devalued or having “nofollow” tags, but it can attract traffic and generate potential opportunities for others to link to you.

Press Release

-    Optimise your press release so it’s easier to get picked up by media editors
Link buying

-    Money makes things easy, doesn’t it? But be wary of potential penalty, it’s not funny if you get caught. But many companies purchased links and dominated the SERP, well, report them, pray they will get caught and keep working on building natural links.

#Web site/page performance#

Check if domain is penalised

-   Search for domain name, if it’s not indexed, you are in trouble [Added by Tola.F: This only applies to website which has established history, it often takes few weeks for new website to get indexed by search engines]

Check how many pages are indexed

-   Sometimes “site:example.com” is not accurate

Check duplicated content

-   If duplicated contents are found, check canonical tag

Check primary keywords ranking

Check total # of links and # of domains link back

Check anchor text distribution

References:

There are many many resources that I’ve read, but unfortunately I cannot remember all of them, so I will list the primary resources here. More references will be placed here if you leave useful resources in the comment (that can make this list better)

SEOmoz guides

SEObook link building 101

SEOmoz ranking factors

David Mihm local ranking factors

15 minutes SEO auditing

Contributors

Tola.F

If you contribute something great to this list, you will be placed here (with a link)