55 Google SEO Factors and Tips
June 6th 2009 12:18 PM
Categories: 
Google has the lion’s share of the search engine market. If you’re trying to drive website traffic from search engines, spending more of your time optimizing for Google makes sense. Bear in mind the following factors and tips will work for other popular search engines such as Yahoo! as well.
Here are 55 Google SEO Factors to improve your search engine rankings in Google.
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Adhere to W3C Website Standards
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Perform Keyword Research On Similar Sites
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Use the W3C Markup Validation Service
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Use keywords in your title and header tags
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Don’t stuff keywords
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Write and present content for your readers, not for search engines
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If starting a new site, use a domain that has been around for years, the older the better
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Get backlinks from similar sites
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Use anchor text in your links
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Ensure your site does not experience frequent outages (get a good hosting provider)
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Create a sitemap on your website, submit one to Google everytime your website is updated
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Avoid duplicate meta, title, and header tags
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Don’t get involved in heavy link buying, especially for newer sites
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Get listed in relevant directories trusted by Google
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Link to other relevant websites that add value to your visitors
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If your starting a new website, be patient, it can take months to achieve solid rankings on Google (The Sandbox Effect)
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Use alt (alternative) tags to describe images
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Use title tags to describe website links
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Implement a Pay Per Click campaign
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Frequently update your website with quality content
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Implement an efficient and intuitive internal linking structure
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Get backlinks from .edu and .gov domains, these are highly trusted by Google
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Ensure your website loads quickly, if possible limit page size to 100kb unless this is not reasonable
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Link to and get backlinks from websites with a high PR
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Try to limit duplicating website content, although this is not as big a factor as before
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Use only one H1 tag to describe succinctly what the page is about
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Use H2 tags to divide out the main sections of each webpage
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Have a more user friendly 404 Page that redirects the user to relevant content
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Use H2 tags to divide out the main sections of each webpage
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Limit the number of hyphens in your url’s, the less the better in general
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Make sure you are using search engine friendly urls
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Keep the urls as short as possible
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Limit your website depth structure as much as possible (how many clicks it takes to find a page)
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Use Google Web Analytics and Google Website Optimizer or related products
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Use supported file types for your images (.png, .gif, .jpg, .bmp)
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Use and focus on mostly text, with images only to help better describe the text
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Use breadcrumb navigation
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Use social media to your advantage, spread awareness and drive traffic
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Do not hide any text
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If you run a business, submit it to Google’s Local Business Center
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Limit your use of Blackhat SEO, especially for new sites
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Create unique content to differentiate yourself from the competition
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Use offsite promotion to drive traffic to your website (Google ranks a site based on how much traffic it gets)
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Avoid using dynamic pages unless absolutely necessary
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Create many structured and organized pages of 250-750 word length with unique and relevant content to your niche
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Make your web links easy to differentiate from normal text by underlining them
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Store all your images in one directory
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Do not underline normal text, users may think they are links
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Break up your content into manageable and easily readable chunks
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Focus on 1 main topic per page
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Encourage use of comments on your website, and add value to other similar sites by commenting on them
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Use a robots.txt file or ‘noindex’ tags on webpages you don’t want search engines to rank
Were these 55 Google SEO factors and tips helpful? Do you have anymore to add? Let us know below.
Nice list, you’ve repeated tip #38 @46. But I guess these should be a good base to start from.
Thx for the feedback, and for pointing out the repetition.