SEO CheckList

There might come a time when you have to redirect your site to a different domain or maybe from a subdomain to a regular domain and you need to know how to do it properly. There is a right way and a wrong way to redirect your site and the best way to permanently redirect your site to anther domain or subdomain is with a 301 redirect. This can be done within you .htaccess file if you are hosted on a linux/unix server. It is very easy to implement and will save you headache in the end. The scary thing about redirects is that you might think that you will lose your rankings and PR, but this is just not the case if done properly. If you do a 301 redirect, then the search engine spiders understand what it means and therefore passes all your information onto the new domain or subdomain. This allows you to conveniently redirect your site and still concentrate on marketing it. Here is a good place to learn how to redirect your website via a 301 redirect. Just make sure and not be scared about doing it, because depending on your circumstances, it maybe a lot more satisfying if you redirect your site to another domain. Just remember, the meta tag refresh way of redirecting is not the way to go in a permanent redirect scenario!

There are a lot of meta tags that you can use on the pages of your website. The thing is that alot of the tags are unimportant and do not provide any help to your website. Let me tell you the two most important meta tags to use while doing seo on your website: the title and description. These two will be the most important ones that you can utilize on your website. You can fill the title and descriptions with important and targeted keywords to ensure that your website gets indexed for what you want it to. You can also use websites that have meta tag generators if you do not know how to do it!

Some of the unimportant meta tags are keyword, author, visit, and many others. You do not really need to put the keyword meta tag because the search engines will pick off the keywords from your content, not your meta tag. Author will not do anything for you because the search engines do not care who created the page. You also do not need to tell the search engines when to visit your site and index it because they choose when to do so. They do not really pay much attention to these type of meta tags. So in the end, optimize your title and description meta tags if you want to start off right!

As webmaster embark into link building for their site, it can become a constant battle in regards to where to find quality links. A long time ago, you could get quality links from directories like DMOZ and others. Now, you would be lucky if you even get into Dmoz. The good thing about this is that there are plenty of other quality directories to submit to. Links in a directory have become a great way to not only get a website indexed in the search engines quickly, but they also provide a quality link pointing to your site.

Now here comes the catch! You cannot just go around submitting to every directory that you can find. Yes, this will increase your backlinks to your site, but in the end, it becomes a large waste of your time. This is because not every directory is going to give you a quality link. Consider a directory that has a lot of spam submissions in it. It has already been devalued in Google’s eyes and with your site being in there, it just doesn’t look good for you. There are plenty of other web directories that are quality and will provide you with what you are looking for….a quality listing! A great list of some of the top quality directories can be found at Directory Critic. This has all the directories categorized that meed a certain criteria and they are also broken out into free and paid to help you choose. I would suggest to have a mixture of free and paid submissions, because free ones just do not give the top quality linkbacks like paid directories do. So the reality of directories is that they are still very important and necessary in regards to link building and PR, but you have to get into the right directories in order to feel the effects!

The common misconception about Page Rank (PR) is that it is calculated by a number of different factors. The simple fact is that that notion is completely false. Your PR is affected by one thing and one thing only, Links!!! The more links you have pointing to your site, the higher the pagerank. Now, don’t think that you can just go get any link from any site and achieve PR greatness, you have to earn it with quality. PR is only passed on to your site from other sites that have PR. You will not gain PR from a link on a page that has a PR0. This will do nothing for you, maybe you will get some traffic from it, but that is another story all together. The objective of the PR game is to gather relative links from sites that have a good PR, like 3 and above. It can be very easy to achieve a PR1 or 2, but it gets harder as it goes upwards. In order to focus on PR increases, you need to focus on acquiring links to point to your site. You can do this a number of ways, either by mutual link exchange, directory submissions, or link purchases. A great place to purchase links is from the Digitalpoint forum links sales section. I have found that there are some good links for a great price on that forum. So, to put the misconception to rest, PR is only about one thing and that is how many links point to your site!

Buying text links has become a popular way to get Backlinks and increase link popularity quickly. Some argue that buying text links is an effective way to increase your Search Engine Rankings and PageRank while others caution that some search engines may penalize your website for buying text links.

Obviously the best types of Backlinks are those that you receive naturally but if you have a new web site or have very few Backlinks, then buying text links may be a viable way to increase your SERPs.

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Most Search Engines consider your website important and rank it higher in Search Engine Results (SERPs) if other websites link to your website. These links, known as Backlinks, will increase your link popularity and ultimately influence the rankings your website receives within various search engines.

The vast majority of Search Engines today use link popularity as an important factor in determining rankings for web sites in SERPs. As a result, you should actively try to get other websites to link to yours.

The best way to do this is to create content on your website which others will find useful and interesting and therefore want to link to it from their own websites.

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