Head Element

<meta name=”description” content=”This sentence describes what the page is about, and should be readable to humans.” />
<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />

• INDEX - include page in results
• NOINDEX - tells Google not to index the page
• FOLLOW - tells google to follow all links on the page
• NOFOLLOW - tells Google not to follow the links on the page
• NOARCHIVE - tells Google not to store a cached copy of the page

Server Configuration

• Correct server errors
• Full 300 redirects
• Have a clean IP address and c-block (someone asked whether switching your domain to a new IP will affect your rankings… he replied “no”, but i’m pretty sure it does..)
• Reverse DNS lookup

SEO Roadblocks

• Dynamic URL’s (avoid using ? parameters in url)
• Session ID’s
  • web is a stateless environment
  • each request is a new connection to the site
  • session id allows site to remember
• Don’t use cookies (??????)
• Poorly formed and broken HTML (causes engines to ignore content) (note: he mentions the w3 validator but doesn’t give a URL)
• robots.txt - text file in root of site telling search engines which pages to index (note: he doesn’t mention robotstxt.org)
• splash pages - blocks crawlers from your site
• Frames - frames won’t be indexed
• Login & other user entry form pages - won’t be indexed
• javascript - search engine spiders do not execute javascript.
• flash sites & other rich internet applications - presents a crawling and indexing problem for search engines
• graphics - use alt text elements so that search engines can understand what the image is about (note: doesn’t mention using title attribute, until someone asks about it). doesn’t mention the ‘longdesc’ attribute
• pages can be hard to access because of url structure
• redirection & canonicalization issues
  • proper redirection
  • use 301 permanent redirect (instead of 302 temporary)
• duplicate content
• search engine spam - use of a technique to artificially improve ranking (see google webmaster help center)
  • too legitimate optimization too far
  • use an optimization that doesn’t follow SE guidelines
  • write content for humans, not spiders
  • don’t stop spiders from indexing your site
  • don’t spam
  • doorway pages
  • cloaking
  • hidden test
  • automated content generation
  • keyword stuffing
  • reciprocal links
  • link triangulation
  • paid links
  • linking to/from ‘bad neighborhoods’
• note to montana:i just asked the speaker, and he (albeit, kinda a dumbass) does acknowledge value in inbound links

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