Tech Memoir of a Web Developer

I found some really good articles on SEO today. Here is a summary of some key points I learned from each article:

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

You Don’t Own Your Brand Online…But You Can Own the Search Results

Promote Positive Pages
Basically, if there are positive pages around your brand that aren’t in the top results, throw some backlinks their way to try and improve their rankings.

Create Content on Other Sites

Create Profile Pages
These tend to do very well in results, but only register on these sites if you are actually going to use them. Sites like Aboutus.org also tend to rank very highly around brand terms because of the authority of the domain and the on-page optimisation / relevance each page has.

Six Ways to Protect and Enhance your Image on the Internet

1) Search (and research) your name
2) Register your name as an internet domain
3) Set up a Google Alert for your name
4) Clean up, and then improve, all of your social networking and internet profiles
5) Generate positive and meaningful content associated with your name

Use SEO tools such as
Search Analytics @ Compete.com