Some of these you may not have as much control over but are still worth
knowing about.
Age of a Site/Page - If all things are equal between two pages competing for
the same keyword, Google is far more likely to rank a site from 2002 over a
site from 2007 because in most cases the older site is seen as more
authoritative. Now, if that first site hasn't been touched since 2004 and
the 2007 site is constantly updated with fresh and unique content, then it's
a different story. Individual pages work in the same way so this is just
something to keep in mind.
Internal Links - If you have a number of pages on your site like a blog with
a lot of posts, and say that one post in particular has gained some
attention and is ranking well on its own (maybe from a little off page SEO),
by linking back to a second page on your site from that popular page, you
have increased the power of that second page. Internal linking is a
beautiful thing because if you're lucky enough to have several pages on your
site ranking well, you can spread that link juice to the rest of your site
without having to rely on anyone else.
Updates - I mentioned this in the age of a page, but Google is far more
likely to rank a page which is updated regularly and adds fresh content on a
regular basis such as articles, blogs, or any new content in general rather
than a similar site which just stagnates. This is just more evidence
supporting the fact that if you want to rank well, you've got to constantly
be working towards optimizing your site because no one gets to the top of
the SERPs, retires, and stays there for long.
Flash Animations, Etc. - Flash animation intros may look neat and some of
your web users may enjoy them, but Google's robots have a hard time
navigating through them to get to your site and incidentally flash pages
never rank well. If you are set on having something like that, make sure
that you include a link beneath the animation to connect that page with the
page you want to follow the animation so that all web users AND search
engine robots can reach and index your site properly.
Avoid 4th Level Subdomains - If you have a funneling style/broad index page
(like going back to the guitar example) where you've got a number of smaller
branching out subdomains, don't go any further than 3 levels. An example
would be "domain.com/subdomain1/subdomain2/subdomain3?. Anything beyond that
final subdomain will likely not get indexed as easily as search robots only
go so far. Plus, having that many subdomains simply isn't conducive to
easily browsing a site if you've got to click on that many links to get to
where you want to go. Remember, one of the most important points when
designing a site is to make sure that it's user/traffic friendly when it
comes to navigation.
Site Maps - In continuing with the point of making a site easily
maneuverable, including a site map and linking to it on every page can be a
major help to search bots when they crawl your site, plus people can use it
to easily navigate, as well. Use a freebie plugin like Google Sitemap
Generator to take care of this with a couple of clicks.
Google Fluff (Privacy Policies/Contact Us) - Your site should have these
either way, but similar to the site map, Google likes a site to have both a
privacy policy and contact section with site wide links to them on every
page as it gives a site much more legitimacy and promotes trust as people
browsing your site like to see these things, as well.
my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can
be done today."
Regards Gerald Crawford
Stellenbosch South Africa
Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile)
E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws
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