Things That Help and Hurt SEO

[djbaxter]

27 Things That Help and Hurt SEO
by Duane Forrester, Bing Webmaster Blog
July 26, 2013

What to pay attention to:

• Title tags
• Meta Descriptions
• Clean URLs
• Images and Alt descriptions (also called alt tags)
• H1 tags
• Rel=Canonical
• Robots.txt
• Sitemaps
• Social sharing options
• Unique content
• Depth of content
• Matching content type to visitor expectations (text, images, video, etc.)
• Usability Page load times (to a certain point ? faster is great, but not at the expense of usability and usefulness)
• Crawlability (AKA discoverability, so can we actually get to all your content)
• News ? if you are actually a new site, submit for inclusion

What to skip:

• Meta Keywords (fill them in if you like, keep it short and relevant, but not a big ranking factor)
• Duplicate URLs
• Overly long URLs (no set number, but you?ve all seen these)
• Cloaking (comes down to your intent, but risky business for sure)
• Link buying
• Selling links
• Link and like farms
• Three way links
• Content duplication content
• Auto following in social media

Read more...

 

[Michael Usov]

Great thread djbaxter,

thanks for that. When you say depth of content, do you mean number of words or the way it was written or something esle?

would also like to add

broken links
spelling errors
html and css issues ( i like Unicorn for that )


Wondering what you all think about other onsite things like

-links to social sites and where do you place them follow/nofollow etc
-people thoughts on outgoing links to authority sites and where to place them on the site

also anything else people want to add to the list would be great!!

All the best,

Michael

 

[djbaxter]

These are guidelines from Bing so you might want to ask the question as a comment on the blog post: 27 Things That Help and Hurt SEO.

But I would assume it means not just content about the given subject but content that makes some meaningful contribution to the topic.

As one example, to me that would absolutely rule out article spinning: No matter how many words you change, it's still something that has been said over and over and over again. That is not meaningful content or content in depth to me.

 

[Laustin1878]

I would wager a guess that depth of content is referring expressing a deep knowledge of the subject at hand. Several articles that circulate around the core subject as well as some meaty articles.

I know Bing was notorious for paying a lot of attention to on-page optimization which is fairly evident in the list provided. They focused and weighted sites that had meta keywords, descriptions, etc.

Linking out should only be used if you truly feel that the site you are linking to will benefit your readers (same should hold true for sites that link to you). Linking out is what can actually land your site in trouble if you link to a bad neighborhood whereas inbound links can't hurt you as much. Also, links out take visitors away from your site. I always stayed away from outbound links unless I saw a kick ass article or reference that my readers would benefit from.

Linking to social sites should not be an issue. Depending on how much visibility you want for them, you could put icons at the top of the site, bottom of an article or in the footer. I always use the footer and seeing more common now, the tops of sites.

Hope this helps a little.