Search Engine Result Page

They are magical, and how they decide to rank different sites is proprietary, secret knowledge.

We do, however, know that the following tags are important in SEO.

• meta
• title
• header tags (h1, h2, ..)
• anchor tags
• alt attributes
• writing good, clean code

• Incorrect / incomplete tags
• Duplicate code / tags
• Too much code
• Text hidden by code
• Unnecessary script code

Identify the key words that are important to you for getting found in search results. For example, for a fishing company in Jackson, WY, jackson, fishing, fishing guides would be keywords.

The title is what shows on search results. It also is used by many social media sites. It influences both users interest and SEO rankings.

• Google shows a maximum of 70 characters. Longer titles are fine, but keep that in mind.
• Identify yourself in your title
• Make the title unique to each page
• Make the title tag match the h1
• Add keywords to the title Careful here! Don't get carried away with making it too long. Adding a location within your title is common practice.

Mostly, ask yourself, what will truly

Meta tags go in the head section, and help identify important information about the page.

<meta name="description" content="My website that's all about stuff.">

This is the most important meta tag for SEO. Just like the title tag provides a title, description provides a description for the webpage.

However, meta descriptions have no impact on SEO rankings. So why bother with them?

Descriptions are seen prominently in two places.

1. Search results The description appears directly below the title.
2. Social media sharing The description is the text that will be seen on the share.

There are times when the description is not shown on the SERP. This is when the keywords searched for do not appear within your meta description. In that case, the user will be given an excerpt of the content on the page. So, be sure to use the appropriate keywords in your description.

Limit your description to 160 characters. (SERPS will not go beyond that) Like the title, each description should be unique.

This is falling out of use. It was a list of comma separated keywords. Both google and bing are ignoring this meta property, as it was too easily abused.

So is it still worth adding? Perhaps, if you're working in countries where google and bing aren't the dominent search engines.

Your homepage is a big deal here. If you can't get from your home page to important content, your need to rework you structure. Typically, home pages will link to "category" pages, which contain yet more links to pages within a category.

These are nice for large, complex webpages.

Structure your website into subdirectories, and give the subdirectories names that make sense. Bonus points if you can use keywords in your URL.

http://www.sports.com/baseball/statistics

Some amount of SEO value is assigned to your naming of internal links.

If you're using a CMS that gives you URLs with strange numbers and codes you don't really understand... well, web spiders feel the same way.

A good CMS will allow you to construct sensible permalinks.

Content that is deep within other subdirectories receives a lower score from spiders, and users are less likely to click such a link.

If you have duplicate pages on your website, the search engine may penalize you for trying to cheat it. Or, the search engine may split your value between the two pages, giving you a lower ranking than you deserve.

Canonicalization allows you to specify "this is the main page for this content". In other words, when you have two urls that point to the same content, the canonicalization

So, to do so, add the following code to the duplicate page.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://myWebsite.com/the-real-url" >

Have your main navigation menu come early in the code for your page structure.

Headers (h1, h2, ...) are important markers that say "this content is important".

The blog post name on your blog, or your product name on your product page.

In fact, try to make the h1 match the title.

For large, single page websites, be sure to use fragment anchors to help users find content.

Use footers to provide links to content that is only occasionally need, but not necessarily important enough to make it into the header / nav. You can also repeat the important links down in the footer as well.

Robots meta

By default, spiders will save and index just about every page they come to on a webpage.

You may have pages you don't want a spider to index, like promotion pages meant for customers provided through email links, or pages for employees only.

Whatever you don't want the public to see should not be indexed.

To keep a page from being indexed, add this meta tag.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

You may still get crawled and cached, but no longer appear on SERPs. Be careful. This will kill your page from appearing on SERPS Do not add it to a template and accidentally kill your entire site.

Robotstxt.org

You can create a file which shuts down parts of your website to robots. NPR's robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /mpx/
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /ramfiles/
Disallow: /*.smil
Disallow: /*.asx
Disallow: /*.ram
Disallow: /*.wav
Disallow: /*.rmm
Disallow: /*.js
Disallow: /*.au
Disallow: /stations/force/force_localization.php?
Disallow: /rundowns/segment.php?

When you link to another page, search engines see it as a "vote" or endorsement for that website. If you have links on your webpage someone is paying for, or there are links on your website you didn't insert yourself (ie, comments), be sure to add the nofollow attribute to the link.

<a href="//usergeneratedlink.com" rel="nofollow">

This keeps us from looking like black hats to google.

No follow inside of a meta robots essentially sets the rel="nofollow" attribute on every link in the page.

Sitemaps.org

A modern sitemap is an xml file created specifically for robots to consume.

At its most basic, a sitemap looks like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

   </url>
  <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/some-page</loc>

   </url>

</urlset> 

Each url can have additional information specified with the following tags.

• lastmod When the file was last updated, in w3c datetime format -- but just YYYY-MM-DD is fine.
• changefreq The frequence with which the url is updated, from the following list
  • always
  • hourly
  • daily
  • weekly
  • monthly
  • yearly
  • never
• priority Values for priority range from 0.0 to 1.0. By default, a page's priority is 0.5. This marks the priority of your pages relative to one another, not to external webpages.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.8</priority>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&amp;desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>

      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&amp;desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>

      <lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>

      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&amp;desc=vacation_newfoundland</loc>

      <lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>

      <priority>0.3</priority>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&amp;desc=vacation_usa</loc>

      <lastmod>2004-11-23</lastmod>

   </url>

</urlset>

Sitemaps cannot have more than 50,000 URLS and be no larger than 10MB. If you exceed this limit, look into sitemap index files

You can also provide RSS feeds or text files.

IF you use a text file, it should have simply one URL per line.

Place your sitemap at the root directory of your webpage and name it sitemap.xml.

http://example.com/sitemap.xml

Specify this location in your robots.txt

...
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
...

Some search engines have webmaster tools that allow you to submit the sitemap directly to the search engine.

Facebook, twitter, and other social media sites allow you to proactively specify how your content should look when it is shared.

Titles and descriptions should still be though of under the same constraints as normal titles and descriptions (70 characters and 160 characters, respectively).

Open Graph description Open graph properties Facebook's open graph protocol uses the following meta tags.

• og:title
• og:description
• og:url
• og:image
• og:type

Twitter Cards API

When links are in tweets, users may see additional information in a nicely formatted display

• twitter:title
• twitter:description
• twitter:url
• twitter:image
• twitter:card

• Authorship
• Places If you're a content creator (blogger)''

I just have a link. Sorry. MDN Vid & Aud