The top SEO tips for social media profiles

SEO (search engine optimisation) and social media have been moving closer together over the past couple of years. Now it seems they’re more integrated than ever, particularly as Google increasingly experiments with bringing in social elements into search results.
You can’t really afford to know one without the other, as you risk doing half a job or missing out on potential traffic. To help with this, we’ve compiled some of the top SEO tips across social media profiles, so you can make sure you have your house in order. Bear in mind that all of the below are recommended as general good practices to stick to – not promises of top positions for your keywords. I would always recommend that you run your social media profiles with your community in mind first and foremost, then consider best practices for SEO after.
These are tips to implement alongside the natural conversations in your community. Many of these tips apply for internal search, such as through Facebook Pages as there will be certain restrictions on the content Google will and can index.

Keywords in Facebook Page updates

It can often be a bit of a push and pull between writing content purely with the user in mind, and writing content that has one eye firmly on SEO. Good practice for SEO copywriting can still apply when you write your updates on your Facebook Page. Since everyone that searches on Facebook has the ability to show results by ‘everyone’, individual posts you write on your Facebook Page could be crucial for getting found by people searching for something current. I wouldn’t advise you let this guide your content strategy overall. Don’t try and write about the royal wedding if it bears no relevance to your brand or community, but when you’re writing updates, think about the keywords that other people might be looking for that could lead them to your Page.

Writing anchor text on your Facebook Page

The same rules of good linking still apply on your Facebook Page, such as linking often and to relevant Pages. In certain places, Facebook also gives you the option to use anchor text in your links, which is a good practice to adhere to. You can do this in the ‘notes’ section of your Page for example. Here you simply write out the code for anchor text as you would normally, replacing the content with your own website and desired anchor text:

<a href="”http://www.thenextweb.com”">Offering creative social media campaigns</a>

When you publish this it will appear as anchor text on your wall. Remember to use relevant keywords in the anchor text, that relate to the page you’re pointing to.

Link often on your Facebook Page

Sending links out from your Facebook Page in general is important in helping to improve your SEO rankings within Facebook search. You should take advantage of the places that Facebook gives you to do this, including the wall and Info text. One of the most important places to link from your Page is in the ‘About’ box on the side of your Page. While you can’t put anchor text here, you can include a standard link, such as in the screenshot below:

Keywords in Facebook photo captions

Even though certain activity within a Facebook page is ‘no follow’ by Google, you should still retain good keyword and linking strategies in all places. This is often overlooked in the ‘photos’ section of your Page, where it can be tempting to stick it up quickly and share it on your wall. The description is on your photo permanently however, so remember to include relevant keywords in the photo description text. Again bear in mind meeting the needs of the user and the search engine. You’re talking to your fans first and foremost so include the keywords naturally in the text, but paying careful attention to those keywords you might want to be found for, both in Facebook and Google search.

Keywords in your Twitter bio

In your Twitter profile, your ‘bio’ is actually the meta description of your Page, making it an incredibly important aspect of SEO on your Twitter profile. Make sure you’re including relevant keywords here that relate both to the general content of your tweets as well as the website you want to promote. This can often be overlooked in terms of keyword optimisation, but should be well-considered, albeit within 160 characters!

Use bit.ly to shorten links on Twitter

Using URL shorteners is often done on Twitter profiles mainly as a way of making links more readable and easily sharable as they reduce the amount of characters used within the tweet. They are also incredibly important in terms of SEO as well. Using url services such as bit.ly or tiny.url use permanent 301 redirects to your content, meaning that your original url benefits from the SEO juice, and not just the tiny url itself.

Keywords early in tweets

In an individual tweet, the first 27-40 characters count as the title tag within a Google search result. It’s important therefore to include your desired keywords early on in the tweet itself to make it more likely to rank in searches. This is what will be indexed by Google so it’s important to keep to this structure as much as possible, while not distracting from the actual conversation in Twitter. Keep these keywords relevant to the rest of the tweet and any URL you include for consideration of the user as well as search engines.

Followers boost your PageRank

This might not be a direct tip, but it’s an important consideration. The more high profile you are judging by the number of Twitter followers you have, the more your PageRank will improve within Google, having a positive effect on your search results. These followers are indexed as ‘inlinks’ to your profile – i.e. Google recognises one Twitter account as linking to yours as a relevant link. Try and attract these followers by tweeting popular, relevant content, which sits very much in line with your natural Twitter strategy.

Use Twitter directories

There are some very easy ways that you can build links to your Twitter profile, while also getting in front of new followers that may be interested in your content: Twitter directories. Through different sites you can link to your Twitter profile, often with the option to add in additional keywords, that should strongly relate to the page you’re linking to. Check out this article from CNET, for a great list of Twitter directories you can add your profile to.

Tweet Often

As much as this is a consideration for your natural Twitter activity, it’s also important for Google search results, now that they integrate tweets into their main search results. If you’re tweeting often about current topics then you can help improve your chances of appearing in Google results. These Twitter links are also contained prominently above the fold in Google search engine result pages, so is a great way to attract new followers, provided the content is in some way related to your core product or service.

Name your Twitter profile picture

A nice little SEO tip to follow here. When uploading your Twitter profile picture, make sure to name it with a relavant keyword that relates to your Twitter profile. The image file name is contained within the link when you click to expand, so avoid just using the file number, as shown in the example above. You can see this yourself by hovering over your profile image in Twitter. Also be sure to use hyphens in between words in the file name, not spaces.

Double keywords in a Youtube video

Obviously, using relevant keywords throughout the title, description and keyword section of your video on Youtube is important. But a good tip to follow is including a keyword twice within a title, such as ‘Facebook Tips: SEO Facebook tips for your business page’. This is good in terms of SEO to get an incredibly important keyword listed twice, but is also good from a usability point of view, as you provide an easy to read format, telling people what your content is about. This is the perfect balance between writing for people and SEO.

Repeat keywords in the video title

Often when it comes to adding in keywords to your Youtube video, you try to add as many relevant keywords that you can think of. While this is good practice, help Youtube out a bit when it comes to displaying your video by repeating words contained in your video title throughout the description and keyword section, as it will help your video to be shown both within Youtube and Google search as this pulls in Youtube video results as standard.

Leave a video reply

Google and Youtube like video pages that have a lot of links built into them, as it shows the relevance of the video content. A great way to do this, which also provides a new organic community around your video content, is by leaving a video reply to related videos within Youtube. You can do this while you’re logged into the correct profile for your Youtube video channel. When you’ve found the video you want to reply to, click on ‘Leave a video reply’ on the right hand side. This will bring up your videos, which you can select and leave as a video response on the page. Use this according to best practice and avoid being too spammy a this could have an adverse effect on your actual content!

Write a full script for your videos

A great way of adding in extra text around your video is to consider writing a full script in the description. Here you can put in additional keywords that are featured in the video and it also allows people to find out more about the content of the video. Next to the title, the description is the second most important thing about your video so make sure it’s well optimised.

Get active on Quora

Google recently announced that they were adding activity on Quora such as asking questions or adding answers into their indexed realtime search results. Quora is a great place to network and build your community anyway, but now that this has such as direct effect on Google search, it should be considered by most marketers and businesses. As these feature in the ‘realtime’ section of a Google SERP (Search Result Position Tool), best practice both for search and your community is to make sure you’re answering and asking questions often.

Top Secret SEO Copywriting Tips?

How To Write a Love Letter to Google (& Other Search Engines)
There aren’t many secrets to SEO Copywriting – but here’s a hint: it is more than knowing how to put two sentences together. A basic understanding of how the search engines determine relevance of a website’s content is a must, that’s no hidden secret. But you must be able to write well. The delicate balance between constructing prose that attracts the attention of the search engines but reads naturally to people, depends on the skill of the writer.
If that’s the secret, and you aren’t a natural writer, don’t despair. Writing is an art, and some people are naturally talented, true. But you can learn to write and the more you do it the better you will get. There are plenty of books to teach you to write. My favorite is Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg.
My not-so-secret, but very important top ten copywriting tips.

1. Don’t confuse SEO copywriting with calls to action and other direct marketing copy techniques. A good copywriter for websites will understand both - but they are two different skills.

2. Focus on Keywords. It starts with keyword research. If there’s an SEO on the project, you’ll be given the keywords for the page. If you’re on your own, do the keyword research first to determine what terms are searched.

3. Look for “long-tailed” keyword phrases. Searchers who type in four to five word query strings know what they are looking for and have qualified themselves in advance. These terms are excellent for conversion.

4. Structure and Heading Tags – Make an outline before you start – I know it feels like high school theme writing all over again. But it works – if your outline is good, your copy will almost write itself, the ideas will flow well for the reader and you’ll know exactly where your h1, h2 and h3 tags belong.

5. Write naturally, write well. Keep your keywords and related terms at the back of your mind in your first draft for the main content. Just let the natural content write itself. When you are happy with this version, return to the copy and see where you may be able to use your keywords without overstuffing the page.

6. Other hot spots for your targeted phrase:

• File names – write keyword rich, logical file names for graphics and page names.
• Anchor text – link away from the page and to the page using your targeted terms
• Numbered and bulleted lists like this one.

7. Look for ways to naturally use your keyword strings in bold, italics, and other styles that bring attention to your targeted copy.
8. Title and Meta Description Tags. Do bring your grasp of direct marketing copywriting to the table with these tags. Your title and description should contain your keyword string, a benefit to the user and a call to action.

9. Don’t ever lose sight of the human visitor. You are writing for both the search engines and the user. Usability must never take a backseat to SEO or you won’t have conversions.
10. Keyword Stuffing – Don’t do it. Hint: find someone you can trust to tell you the truth and ask them to read your copy. They can tell you whether it sounds natural or whether the keywords trip their “stuffing meter.” 

The Best SEO Backlink Strategy: Tips For Success

What SEO backlink strategy do you use for your web sites? Or do you even have a strategy? If not, it’s time that you do. You can no longer just ‘write great content’ and others will magically link to you – that is just not going to happen. Site owners with high PR and authority now know too well how important linking is – and are not likely to link you without something in return.

But others pursue their SEO backlink strategy as a full-time mission, and in the process neglect their site’s content and relevancy for the very terms they are trying rank for – another mistake. So
where do you fall? Are you ignoring the need  to get backlinks in order to improve your search engine placement, or are you so wrapped up in your SEO backlink strategy that you are neglecting your content?
Somewhere in between, of course is where you want to be. Now is the time that you get disciplined; as it is the disciplined marketer who will win the race – and that means setting up a schedule for yourself. Your time is your most precious resource – particularly when you are sitting in front of a computer; with all the data available online, it’s just too easy to get distracted and waste your valuable time.  You need an SEO backlink strategy that is the most effective use of your time and resources.

So don’t get so wrapped up in your backlinking that you neglect other vital aspects of your business. Here are some tips to help you create a manageable, but effective SEO backlink strategy:
1. Outsource – backlink building is grunt work and it’s best to pay someone to do it. You don’t need to spend valuable time creating forum profiles, bookmarking sites or posting blog comments. There are lots of services available on various Internet Marketing forums – and for the most part they are cheap and reliable. Just check feedback on the forums before you buy.

2. Use backlinks software to index your new links – when you get your list of links from your outsource provider, use a program like Backlink Index Express to ‘backlink your backlinks’. This will insure that your links appear quickly in the search engine’s indexes.

3. Choose keywords carefully – don’t waste time trying to rank for terms where the first-page search results are dominated by high PageRank authority domains and root URL’s. A search result with a root url, like this one:
www.mydomain.com/

This is a is more difficult URL to compete against than a search result with a url like this:
www.mydomain.com/deeplinkpage/sudirectory/content.html
A root url means the competing site is ranking well for that term, if there are no root url’s for your keyword – that is good for your chances to rank.

4. Evaluate the backlinks to the top 3 search results for your given search term – this will tell you a lot about the strength of the competition. If the first 3 to 5 results have over 200 links (page links, not domain links) – then it’s going to be hard to rank against those pages without lots of linking. You can rank against them, but do the easier keywords first, get some money coming in, then use the resource to attack the stronger competitors.

Backlinking IS important – but it’s not everything. Use your head when creating your SEO backlink strategy and you’ll have a manageable program that can produce great results.

3 Post-Penguin SEO Tips for Backlink Cleanup

If Google's Penguin update earlier this year proved anything, it was that search giant cares about the quality of the backlinks pointing at a website. Furthermore, it has the tools necessary to detect and penalize low-value links that have been created to manipulate page rankings.
So if you've seen a decline in your site's performance since the Penguin update, or if you'd just like to protect your site from future problems, consider these techniques to remove bad links and avoid penalties:

1. Identify low value links within your backlink profile.

The search engines prefer to look at backlinks as "editorial votes" -- that is, they believe an inbound link pointing at your website represents a vote of confidence from the referring site. In a perfect world, the site with the most links from the best websites would be ranked at the top of the search results.
But of course, we don't live in that perfect world. Today, unscrupulous webmasters have made it their goal to "hack" this valuation system, resulting in linking strategies that artificially inflate a site's backlink profile. Although the search engines haven't always been able to effectively detect and penalize this manipulation, they're getting better at it every day. And the Penguin change has shown conclusively that they're ready to penalize webmasters whose sites use such techniques.
With this in mind, the first step in protecting your site from search engine penalties is to identify any links that could be perceived as low value or intentionally manipulative. You'll need to first get a copy of all the links pointing at your website, using tools such as Majestic SEO($49.99+/month) or the Open Site Explorer ($99/month, following a free trial).
Export your links to a spreadsheet or use your chosen program's internal research tools to identify links that meet any of the following criteria:

• Is hosted on a website that uses a different language than your own
• Is hosted on an adult-oriented website
• Is hosted on a site that offers no value to readers; such sites are often built for the sole purpose of granting links to other websites
• Is hosted on sites that have been hacked or infected with malware
• Uses keyword-optimized anchor text (for example, a link that reads "cheap car insurance quote" rather than "click here")

Search engines won't necessarily penalize you for having some keyword-rich anchor text, but when anchor texts collectively aren't diverse enough, it appears unnatural and can raise red flags, particularly if they're on low-quality sites.

2. Determine which links should be removed.

Although all of the above criteria should be cause for concern, seeing a link that falls in the "low quality" category isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the link is no longer active or has been tagged with the appropriate "no-follow" tags to instruct the search engines to ignore it, you don't need to worry about removing the backlink.
To determine whether or not a link should be removed, take the following steps:
• Click each link within your spreadsheet. If it is no longer active and redirects you to a 404 page, you don't need to pursue removal.
• If you are able to reach an active web page that's hosting your link, right click on the page to open its source code. If you see the tag <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the <head> section of the page's code, you do not need to pursue removal. The webmaster has instructed the search engines not to scan this page for links.
• If you do not see this code in the header, navigate through the source code to find the link pointing at your website. If the tag <REL="NOFOLLOW"> has been appended to your link, you do not need to remove it.
In nearly all other cases, the link you're researching is active and is being counted by the search engines. Because these signals may indicate a manipulative or low value backlink, you'll want to move to step 3 for details on how to remove these bad links.

3. Contact website owners to request a change.

Begin by finding the contact information for the website's owner. In most cases, this information is on the "About" or "Contact" page. You also search online for a free "DNS Lookup" tool, which will allow you to enter the URL in question in order to find the webmaster's email address that's on file with the site's domain registrar.
When you contact the webmaster, request:

• The deletion of the link
• A change of anchor text to something that's not keyword-optimized
• The addition of the appropriate no-follow tags so that your links are no longer active

Unfortunately, not all webmasters will respond to your requests. But by documenting the efforts you've made to clean up your backlink profile, you'll be well positioned to respond to any future penalties using the search engines' reconsideration request procedures.
Alternatively, if you used a link building service to create high volume backlinks in the past, try contacting the service directly to see if it will delete or change your links for you.

SEO Tips for Photographers

I am not a photographer. I don’t own an expensive camera, nor do I know much about aperture or depth of field or the difference between a Canon 5D and a Canon 1DX. But I do know that the photo’s I’m seeing people I know who do know about that stuff create are simply amazing!
There are some incredible photos that pop up on my various social network feeds almost daily and I am amazed at how people are able to make a photo of something look completely different or far more beautiful than I can see it with my own eyes.
In summary, I don’t know how to take great photos, but I do know search and SEO. I also think good photography kicks ass! And I love seeing people who have such incredible talents to create these photos get the exposure they deserve.
This post is for all those photographers out there who create amazing works of art but need a little help in how to make a dint in 1,000,000,000+ posts that exist in search engines about photography.

Get a website and build a blog!

Don’t be afraid that your site will just be another drop in the ocean and that nobody will want to read what it is you have to say. If you love what you do then you should talk about it. There is always an audience that is looking for advice, reviews, experiences, case studies or simply want to hear what you have to say about photography.
If you love the subject, don’t be afraid to talk about it. Be as nerdy or as high level as you find interesting. In fact, the nerdier and more technical you are, the more long-tail terms you are likely creating for your site. Long-tail photography terms are absolute gold when it comes to organic search.

Focus on specifics

It’s often the specifics that like-minded people will be searching for. Thinking that a post about the new APS-C CMOS sensor (and yes, I had to Google that) won’t appeal to anyone is silly. There are people on the Internet searching for information on that right this very second! Why shouldn’t your post be the article they get served up by Google?

Don’t be afraid to use big images

Thumbnails and tiny images provide no real benefit to your audience and completely under-sell your skills and the photo.
Using larger images increases the likelihood that people will appreciate and ultimately share your content across the web.
If people using your work without permission is a concern, then consider adding a watermark to your images featuring your URL. Having an image featuring your URL is a great indirect link-building technique too.

Offer snippets that allow sharing of the photo

Include a html snippet for each photo that allows a user to copy the code and paste it directly into their site.
EG: Copy and paste this into your website to share this photo
<a href=”yoursite.com”><img src=”yoursite.com/pic.jpg”></a>
By making sure the code includes a link wrapped around the image you are providing an option for other websites to use your photo without them needing to download and host your image, as well as scoring a link on their site.

Don’t forget the basics

It’s easy to overlook, but when creating a site to host your photos and content don’t forget the simple SEO elements that can enhance your sites authority.
ALT tags on images: use rich keywords that describe your photo. ALT tags compensate for when text cannot be used in a web asset (like images).
Titles: Use titles on pages that contain your images. Make the titles relevant to the post. Try to incorporate keywords too.
Page titles: Be sure you titles are relevant to the images or subject matter. Include your name or domain name too.
Meta Description : You have around 160 characters to provide a summary of why someone should care about this post. Think of your target audience and use terms and sentences that would make them want to click your link.
Sitemap.xml : Be sure you have an image site map uploaded. These tell search engines which images should be crawled and added to the index.

And also the not so basics

Schema mark-up, rich snippets and open graph protocol play a big part in how search results are displayed across social platforms and search engines. When building your site, be sure to include basic rich snippets such as the rel=”author” tag.

Get social. Promote Yourself.

This is a no brainer really. Social Media is probably the greatest promotional tool for photographers ever created. Anyone can set up a Facebook or Twitter account and share photos, the trick however is to do is smart!
Facebook is the largest photo sharing platform on Earth. It offers some amazing groups where you can ask for advice and feedback on your work, find hints and tips and perhaps the most important aspect – network.
Photographers are utilising Google Plus more than any other industry out there in my opinion. It allows you to interact with some of the world’s best photographers and promote your work with a massive like-minded audience. G+ is the ultimate networking tool for photographers while also directly influencing search results.
Pinterest is a photographers social best friend. Photos are the most shared content on this platform. Simply offering users the ability to ‘Pin’ your photos to their Pinterest boards could generate more traffic to your site than any of the other social networks combined.

Top 10 Tips to improving your SEO

1. Keyword Research

It is essential when optimising your site, that the content is keyword rich. However, there is little point in writing keyword dense copy if the keywords are not commonly used in search terms.
It is advisable to keep keywords ambiguous when using any SEO tool, e.g. KeywordDiscovery or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This will allow the SEO tool to return more suggestions, some of which may be surprising, and ones you had not thought of.
SEO tools will also allow you to see the levels of competition for the most popular keywords. This will allow you to optimise your campaign for the most effective keyword use.

2. Link Building

A high Google PageRank is something most sites aim for, and while the algorithm for determining page rank is constantly changing the number and quality of links into your site always features.
We suggest using reputable sites and niche directories to link back to your site. With genuine, relevant content, links back to your site can really boost your site’s PageRank.
Some SEO tools will also allow you to view the number of links your competitor sites contain, this will enable you to make sure you have more valid links therefore it is likely your page rank will increase.

3. Deep Linking

While it is important to have as many good quality relevant links as possible coming into your site, it is equality important that these go to different pages across your site. This will allow you to target more relevant links to each specific page. This will not only improve users experience more but will allow search engines to see that your site has lots of valid content, boosting PageRank. Sites that only have links going to the homepage are often viewed as shallow by search engines, or that the links are not genuine and generated by automation, reducing the sites value.

4. Sitemaps

The site map is an important tool for increasing the ease of navigation across your site. It allows web crawlers from search engines (and users) to quickly and efficiently search every page of your website. Every page of content is therefore easier to find, reducing the number of clicks, both web crawlers and users have to make before reaching the required content.
There is another version of the sitemap that is also used by search engines. XML sitemaps consist of a list of all pages and include the dates the pages were last modified. XML sitemaps are submitted to search engines to help them find and link to all of the content on your site.

5. Relevant Content

The most important part of SEO is perhaps having content relevant to your main page or site topic. The readable text on the page needs to be relevant to the targeted keywords and information in the meta tags and alt tags.
The content needs to read well, in addition to being keyword dense, in order to be useful to a reader. All information needs to be explained fully so it makes sense to the reader. The site content needs to be relevant in order for the search engine to link it to the search term. However some keyword stuffed copy can appear to be spam and put potential users off.

6. Optimise Meta Tags

The Meta tags are in the code of the site. The two most important meta tags are the description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about and are still have a role in the search rankings.
The description tag is what users will read when your page comes up in search listings and can make the difference between them clicking on your site or not. The recommended length for the description meta tag is 150 – 200 characters. The description tag should have a few keywords within it but should not be stuffed with keywords, this should read like a sentence, not a list.
Many search engines hold little importance to the keyword meta tags due to “keyword overstuffing”. However all search engines still recommend adding them. When putting your list together, you need to think of the terms people are likely to be searching for (see Keyword Research), so they are led to your site with relevant content. It is not useful to add too many duplicates to your site (e.g. SEO agency, SEO agencies, London SEO agency, etc) as these are essentially the same, it is better to pick one or two variations of each keyword.

 7. Use Alt Tags for Images

The alt tags will help SEO as a brief, descriptive alt tag can add relevant text to your source code, which search engines can see when indexing your site. A higher search ranking can be obtained with more relevant content, making these tags valuable.
The use of alt tags also helps the visually impaired who asses the site using screen reader. Whilst they cannot see the image, the alt tag describes what the image was off, so they do not miss any content from the site.

8. Social media

Not technically SEO, Social Media is a fast growing factor in getting your website noticed, and is an important element to include in plans.
Social Media is a term used to describe a variety of Web-based platforms, applications and technologies that enable people to socially interact with one another online. Some examples of social media sites and applications include Facebook, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg, blogs and other sites that have content based on user participation and user-generated content (UGC).
To achieve the most form social media it is important to have a give and take relationship. Helping members out with retreats, or digs or giving helpful advice will increase the effectiveness of this media.

9. Ensure Domain Name Contains keywords

You do not need to pack lots of keywords into your domain name, but a few carefully chosen keywords to highlight the topic of the website are useful. Too many keywords in the domain name can make a site look like it is spam based. Avoiding the overuse of hyphens is also a key element in getting the domain name right.

10. Use Headings

The page title will be the first thing a search engine will look at when determining what the page is about. It is also the first thing visitors to your site will see when they get to your page. Therefore it is important that heading contain one or two keywords, they are relevant to the content on the page and provide appropriate targeting.
Headings have an important role in the organisation of information on a website, they are also able to provide aesthetically pleasing aspects to a site. It is recommended to use the appropriate page heading tags through out the site as these enable webcrawlers to access the site easily.

Basic SEO Tips Every Web Developer Should Follow

1. Place Your Keywords In the Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.
Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long.

2. Optimize Your Robots.txt

Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.

3. Proper Use of the ALT Attribute

The <alt> attribute should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read the <alt> attribute, and having it spammed with keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of what to derank you for.

4. Anchor Text of Links

The anchor text is the text inside your <a> tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.
So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to

5. Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links

While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.
Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.

6. Proper Use of Header Tags

<h1>, <h2> tags etc. should be used when appropriate. Don't be using <h2> tags as a paragraph or using <div> class="title"</div> to display the title of your page or something.
Here's a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:

• only use one <h1> tag per page
• you can use as many <h2> - <h6> tags as you like in your pages
• search engine crawlers only read basic html

7. Importance of the First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.
If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.

8. Ensure Your Site is Accessible

An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.
Use tools like:

• Are My Sites Up?
• Link Validation Spider

To know if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.

9. Use SEO Friendly URLs

The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.
Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important(ie. have a large amount of inbound links).

10. Site Usability

f your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.
Take a look at the following example which I took from SeoMOZ.org.

These examples clearly show the impact a decent design has on the way users perceive the website. Users are more likely to buy from Haworth's Furniture because the site just gives a more trustworthy vibe than Workplace Office's website. Furthermore, people are more likely to tell a friend about Haworth's website because it just has better usability and seems more trustworthy than Workplace Office's website.
While a nice design doesn't have a direct impact on the rankings of a page, it will indirectly influence it due to users linking back to the site, trusting it etc.