[samscully]

Here are some notes I made when I worked for a company that did very well in SEO. This was a few years ago now, so this might be horribly out of date now.

Hygiene factors

- Never expose an error page to Google. - Never expose an empty page. - Make sure all content is visible on first page load (e.g. not behind pop ups). - Show the same content to Google as to users. - Make sure all relevant content is in the HTML (not loaded dynamically). - Make sure page load times are good.

Keywords

- Research keywords you need to match. - Build database of search terms you wish to match, grow and improve this database over time. - Carefully curate pages, their URLs and metatags to match these keywords. - Use this database to choose which pages to expose to Google and make sure that all links and pages have the correct follow/nofollow attribute. - Steadily grow the content you expose to Google over time, keeping the quantity and quality of content on pages exposed to Google high.

Site structure and internal links

- Organise your site in a shallow tree structure. Top level pages should have many links to lower level pages. - All levels of the tree should have keyword rich content which is useful to users. - Not every level of the tree needs to be visible in the Google search results, it is mostly to make things easy for the crawler.

External links

- Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - Do not generate fake backlinks, if Google thinks you are doing this they will give you a severe penalty.

Submit your sitemap

- Submit your sitemap in Google webmaster tools and make sure it is kept up to date at least weekly.

Bounce rate

- Carefully monitor your bounce rate and time on site for users coming from Google as these are key factors in Google rankings.

Click through rate

- Use descriptive and relevant titles and metatags to improve the click through rate from the Google search results to your site. - PR, social media, advertising and other channels can improve brand awareness that in turn improves click through rate. - Regularly check a selection of searches that you rank on to assess the quality of your Google search listings.

[encoderer]

This is really very good.

[rchaud]

Most of these are still current SEO practice, however:

> Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. -

FB, Twitter and Reddit may not mark external links as "nofollow" explictly (which would kill their backlink value), but searc engines are smart enough to reduce the power of these links as these are "user-generated content" links and are less valuable as they're not authored by the "site owner" in the way a blog post or web page would be.

The impact of these links on social isn't zero, but it's not great either. You're better off trying to get qualified, organic traffic to your site (say from a backlink on a related site or from an email newsletter) as those clicks will likely have a lower bounce rate, which is good for SEO.

[noelceta]

Yep, the impact of social links is pretty low on their own. You do, however, get these 2 benefits:

- If your content gets a ton of views, people will start Googling for it and clicking your result, specifically. This will increase your CTR, which is a known ranking factor. - People who LOVE your content on Reddit or wherever will link to your website from their blog (hence, more backlinks).

[aklemm]

I'll never forget the SEO consultant who, when I told him I wanted to focus on CTR, told me it was not a factor in ranking. This was many years ago, but it was obvious Google would use it, and it should have been obvious to him too.

[rawoke083600]

In his defence Google is on record saying they DON'T use it.