#1 Content
As cliché as it sounds this is the number one for any search marketing strategy, it is impossibly important to ensure that you have content worth viewing. Without this one simply step to ensure that there is a reason for someone to be on your site, everything else is useless. There are a lot of great sites to find inspiration for writing great content that works.
#2 Incoming Links
A link is a link is a link, but without the simplest form you aren’t going to do well in search engines. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have the proper anchor text for your incoming links. The easiest way to gain quality links from other sites is to link to sites to let them know your site is there and hope for a reciprocal link. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site.
#3 Web site title
Making sure that you have the right web site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. Not only is it important for robots to index and understand the topic of the page either. It is important for click-through rates in the search results. Pay attention to what you click on when you are searching in Google, I know that I don’t always click the first results. Using great titles and topics on your site will bring you more trafficthan a number one listing. Most of the time it is within the first page, but I skim through the titles to see which looks to be more on-topic for my search query.
#4 Heading tags
When you are laying out your site’s content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the h1 tag, which says “this is what this block of copy is about.Making sure you understand heading tag structure is very important. You only want to have one (or two) h1 tags per a page. It is important to not just throw anything into an h1 tag and hope you rank for it.
#5 Internal Linking
Making sure that your internal linking helps robots (and visitors!) to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots (and visitors!) more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you don’t want to rank in Google that you add a nofollow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.
#6 Keyword Density
Ensuring that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic is paramount. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it “comes up†often is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more then 5% of the total copy per a page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. It is really all about context and relevance— just make sure it is good, quality copy.
#7 Sitemaps
It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.
#8 Meta Tags
Everyone will tell you that meta tags don’t matter, they do. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Definitely a much overlooked (as of late) ranking factor. Getting indexed by search engines and ranking well is just the first step. The next, and biggest, step is getting that visitor that searched for your keywords to want to click on your search listing.
#9 URL Structure
Ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. There are various methods to make this work, such as modrewrite on apache.
#10 Domain
It can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.
