When it comes to search, it's all about LUMP
- The number of people who link to you raises your relevance.
URL:
- The text of the search should appear in the actual URL. IE: "mp3" is best found when the URL is http://www.whatever.com/mp3.html
- Domain based (if mp3 appears in the domain it will rank higher than sub directories). IE: www.mp3.com is better than www.whatever.com/mp3.html
- Relevancy appears to be ranked by TLD in this order: .GOV, .EDU, .COM, .NET
- Choose alphabetical order for link names. Choose "hot_tubs.html" over "tubs_hot.html"
META tag:
- META data is highly valued as individual keywords and easily indexed.
- Don't repeat keywords in META KEYWORD tags. Use them to increase relevance on other search terms that are similar.
- Keep the length of META KEYWORD tags less than 250 chars total. Prefferably less than 150.
- Keep the length of META DESCRIPTION tags less than 1024 chars total.
Placement:
- Placement of the text on the page near the top raises relevance
- The first 100k for Google is all that is indexed.
- Things in H1 have higher relevance than H2 and so on.
- Make CSS and JavaScript links rather than inline to improve text relevance.
- Use absolute links to insure cached hits make it back to your page and links, JavaScript, CSS, etc are served properly.
- Title text should include relevent information.
- Some search engines require that you have at least 100 words.
- Make sure your IMG tags have both ALT and TITLE attributes with appropriate content.
- Search engines read from left to right and top to bottom, so keywords and links should be placed appropriately.
- Keyword proximity to one another increases likelyhood of search relevance.
- Keyword density should be between 3-7% of your text. That is 3-7 out of 100 words that will be indexed (IE: "and" "or" "not" are not indexed) should be relevant.
- Try not to repeat any keyword more than 7 times within any <TAG>tag</TAG> including <COMMENT> tags.
