Cerberus SEO 101 Guide - Search Engine Opitmization

This is pretty basic, but for those who do not know much about SEO will be a great help. This is my checklist that I use and a guide that has be cultivated for over 10+ years.

Step 1) Picking your domain
Most people don't know that they seriously hurt their sites with bad domain choices. I see it time and time again. The best way to choose a domain is to choose one that is relevant to your content. For example if your making a site about oranges..Then www.oranges.com = GOOD , www.apples.com = BAD. I know that sounds stupid, but the point is that you should always include your main keyword in your domain name. This will help you 100% when attempting to SEO your site.

Step 2) Duplicate content and choosing www. or no www.
The second thing you should always do is to decided which you want to use www or no www. Doing this now saves you from dealing with problems later on. I would suggest doing this right away after setting up hosting and pointing domain and all. You can do this a couple ways, one is through your hosting panel, and another is using htaccess. If you have cpanel its very easy to do in the panel, but for those DIY types here is the code:

Simple create a txt file called .htaccess in notepad. Don't forget the . in front of name and then save it as all files. Then enter the correct code for your choice and save it. Then upload to the root directory of your site

This is for no WWW:

Code:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [URL]http://example.com/$1[/URL] [R=301,L]

This is for WWW:

Code:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [URL]http://www.example.com/$1[/URL] [R=301,L]

Step 3)Quality Content
This pretty much goes without saying, but I like to put it on the list. You want to have some good quality content chock full of keyword rich descriptions and such. You should know before you build the site what keywords your going to target, so you want to sneak those in, but not overdo it. Its kind of like a game. Keyword stuffing is BAD, but just enough is fine. I on a rule try to keep all my keywords I want to target at about 5 to 7% density on a page. I do this just because this is what I learned way back when. And I am a stubborn person who is set in my ways. Also, another good tactic which has never been proven positive or negative is surrounding you main keywords with the

Code:

<strong> 

tag, for example

Code:

<strong> keyword</strong>

. I do this all the time just out of habit. I have no idea the pros and cons. Some people still use Bold tags, but I like strong.

Also, just to kill 2 birds with one stone, you want to work in some adsense targeting here, assuming you will be using addsense. So, you would want to add weight to your main content, like so :

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

Code:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
stuff
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Or you can take it away..

Code:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
stuff
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Doing this assures you better content relevant ads from adsense. Not always, but hey they say do it and we will reward you. So its worth doing it.

Step 4)Meta Tags
People sometimes forget these still do matter. Every engine uses them for something. Most of them use them to pull description from for your Serps. And can leave you with ugly looking Serps if you don't take care of this, plus if you take the time they can also help you in the engines. You want to have relevant Meta for every page of your site. Luckily, like on a forum using variables and such we can bypass having to do this manually, but if your doing it manually then you will have to do it by hand in HTML or whatever it is your coding in. That blows, but hey these are still important.

Step 5)Sitemap
I am hoping everyone knows what a sitemap is, so I am not going to talk much about it. But once you have all your content ready and your ready to submit to the engines, then create a sitemap. There are tons of tools you can Google for this, so use Google

Step 6)Robots.txt
This is very important in helping you weed out the crap on your site. Alot of sites have pages that really serve no purpose or value for Google. They are only there for the users. And so we use a simple robots.txt to weed them out. I cant talk much about this because not everyone is going to be the same. But, if your using vbulletin I will show you what we are using.Also, always include a valid link to your sitemap at the bottom of your robots.txt. This is very Pr0

http://truecheaters.com/robots.txt

Step 7)Submitting to engines
This is your last step. You have everything ready and now its time to send your site out into the world. And to this you just submit it to the engines. We are lucky that on most forum software type sites it does this for us. But, I suggest still signing up to the major engines webmaster tools and submitting it yourself at first.

Google Webmaster Tools
Msn Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer

Also, these are great for gathering and checking data. It helps you as a guide to make sure your keeping on top of everything. I would also recommend google analytics, because its free. And does a good job tracking everything. But, its not a must have. You can use whatever you want to keep track of data and such

Step 8)*Optional* Validate your pages
If you coded up all your pages on your site in HTML I would definitely recommend this, but its not a must.

W3C Validation

I never take the time to do it, because I don't know. I never was much into validating every page. Maybe just the most viewed ones if have time. It will help you to SEO your images better if do it though.

And that's it. My basic guide to SEO. I think I covered all the important basics, but feel free to comment and ask questions.

 

I usually go without www.. There is no real benefit to either. One is shorter is all. But, you should do it to stop duplicate content and cookie problems on your forums where people are logging into both with and without.

 

No, as long as you use the proper redirect. One needs to be the main site and the other should redirect to the main. Google likes 301 redirects. So, I would suggest as long as it is done right you are fine

 

Most of it is still relevant. I would disagree with the backlinks idea though. Google has moved more towards content than inbound links. Too many inbound links are now considered spam, thank god. I have bitched about that for years and even had long conversations with Matt about them taking weight from backlinks.I have always seen it as spam. But, had you followed my information years ago you would not have seen a decline during the Panda updates. I have older clients, whom reaped tons of rewards on the updates. They instantly shot to the top of google due to my SEO and concentration on OnPageSeo. The Static vs Dynamic is an interesting argument though. I do not see any real proof of one versus the other, but I would love to discuss it more if you have any valid proof. As to html5 being better, again no real proof. Also, the strong tag, another either way thing, but it looks nice. And who knows if it still matters, it did at one point. But, it helps the visitors find what they want easier, content sticks out more. I should probably update some of it though.. Maybe when I get some free time