Many have requested a Top Ten list of the items to concentrate on the most when building or revamping a site with Google in mind. This is more of a list on taking either a new site, or a struggling site and getting better performance.
1. You will need your web hosting company to assign you a unique IP address for your domain. Make sure it is a new IP address and not a recently recycled one. If they do not have a new one available, make sure you ensure that the IP address is clean from being on any blacklist. Having your own clean IP address is critical to start out on the right foot with Google. We will have a series about how to pick the right web hosting company and even tell you about a few that we use and why we do. Also included is who to avoid.
2. Create the redirect so non-www URLs resolve to www. This is more important than you think which is why I put this as step #2 after getting a web host. Do this first thing so it off your list.
3. Create a robots.txt file and upload it to your server (same place where your index.html file is located).
4. Create all CSS and JavaScript as external files. This is vital not just for the page size, but also the indexing. Testing shows that by removing CSS and JavaScript from the content of the HTML improves all aspects of your site being indexed.
5. Check your site for compliancy. You need to have a good understanding of HTML to know what to change and what to keep. You need, or your webmaster needs, to understand the difference between “W3C Compliancy” and “Search Engine Bot Compliancy”. You also want to be “Google Compliant” too. Keeping yourself familiar with the webmaster guidelines is just a good idea.
6. Keyword research should be done to target keywords that can be converted into sales, not just clickthroughs for traffic. Shoot for keywords in “the long tail”, meaning those people who are deep into the buying cycle and are close to making a decision. Usually these are phrases in the 3-6 word range. Your pages (in the body) should be in the 400-600 word range, with a strong headline (keyword included) and a keyword density of 1-2%. You also need to Create Solid Title Tags. This is often very misunderstood for SEOs. You should also review the on page factors.
7. Google Sitemaps. This is an absolute must. If you are having difficulty with Google, often this is how you find the cure to your ills. New site? This is how you don’t get into trouble. Spend 2 hours on Friday, every Friday going through and fixing problems that Sitemaps shows you and you will see continued increases in your traffic.
8. Submit your site to the top directories.
9. Get moving on solid link exchanges – and obtaining links inward to your site – not just to the home page, but to subpages as well
10. Get a blog and post to the blog every other day (at least) and get on a schedule to update your content, and add new content on a weekly basis. This will ensure that Googlebot will continue to come back and index your site on a regular basis.