Keyword Stuffing Definitions

Wikipedia defines keyword stuffing as:

An unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique.

Google officially defines keyword stuffing as:

The practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results.

Do a Google web search on “Keyword Stuffing” and Google Wonder Wheel tool relates “Keyword Stuffing” to:

• Keyword Stuffing Example
• Keyword Stuffing Search Engines
• Keyword Density
• Keyword Stuffing Limit
• Check Keyword Stuffing
• Keyword Stuffing Webmaster Help Center
• Black Hat SEO
• Inbound Links

Google’s Related Searches shows keyword stuffing relates to:

• Keyword spamming
• Spamdexing
• Link farms
• Link Baiting
• Doorway Pages

Keyword Stuffing Techniques

Keyword stuffing’s purpose is to increase the keyword density of a webpage. Keyword density is the number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times a keyword appears on a page, the more weight the keyword is given by the search engines when a search query matches keyword.

The black hat SEO techniques of keyword stuffing include:

• Placing repeated keywords in the body of a webpage where readability and the meaning of the content are neglected.
• Hiding keywords on a webpage by making the text the same color as the background.
• Stuffing keywords in META keywords tags or in comment tags.
• Over-filling image alt tags with long strings of keywords.
• Placing keywords in cascade style sheet (CSS).
• Filling keywords in noscript tags.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Google and other major search engines today no longer gives good rankings to pages employing keyword stuffing techniques.

• Google’s Matt Cutts insists avoiding keyword stuffing.
• SEO Black Hat explains how search engine detects keyword stuffing techniques.

As over-optimizing your webpages’ keyword density can backfire, focus on white hat search engine optimization techniques by reviewing Google SEO for Beginners and Google SEO Starter Guide.

Web Page Content, User Experience, Related Keyword Research

Keyword stuffing is strongly discouraged as this method:

• Detracts the readability and usability of your web pages.
• Creates negative user experience and high web analytics bounce rate to your site.

When creating website content, focus on user experience by creating useful and informative content that uses keywords in context and without repeating the same keywords excessively. Use keywords that are highly related to the core keywords of your web pages. Use keyword research tools to find the related keywords:

• SEM keyword research tools
• Google Wonder Wheel tool
• Google search-based keyword tool
• Google Insights for Search

For Chinese keywords, use:

• Chinese keyword research tools
• Baidu keyword research tool

• Google’s Algorithm
• Yahoo’s Algorithm
• Bing’s Algorithm

Stephen Noton’s 14 main Points to Google’s search algorithm:

• Website’s IP / server location
• Title of page
• META description
• Domain name
• PageRank of links to the website
• Number of links to the website
• PageRank of links to the page
• Text in the links to the page
• Number of links to the page
• Page’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on search results
• Stickiness of page from search results
• Freshness of page content
• Page theme/keyword density
• Total number of pages on website
• Website’s theme in Google
• Links on page to external websites

Stephen Noton’s 9 additional items used by the Google SPAM check:

• Location on page of external links
• Text surrounding external links
• Uniqueness of page with linking to the page
• Number of links on the page linking to the page
• Maintenance of external links
• Quality of hosting company / name servers
• Name / email used on registration
• Domain registrar used
• Length of domain registration

Stephen Noton’s 9 main Points to Yahoo’s search algorithm:

• Title of page
• META description
• Domain name
• WebRank of website
• WebRank of links to the page
• Text in the links to the page
• Number of Links to the page
• Page’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on search results
• Page theme/keyword density

Stephen Noton’s 6 main Points to Bing’s search algorithm:

• Title of page
• META description
• Text in the links to the page
• Number of links to the page
• Page theme/keyword density
• Freshness of page content

Before your website ranks well on Google, Yahoo and Bing, make sure you monitor how the top three search engines think about your site regarding, pages crawled, crawl rate of your web pages, back links, sitemaps, robots.txt, and error issues such as 404.

Sign up and use the webmaster tools below that are specifically provided to each of the three search engines:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster Tools

Buy-in from Executives

Before In-house SEO can be started, the entire management team (of executives) must be convinced, involved and in agreement. The corporate executives are the people who make strategic decisions on company directions and can authorize your SEO team the use of company resources.

• Analyze the SEO performance of the major competitor websites via Hitwise or ComScore
• Present the data to the management team and explain how the SEO work will benefit the company’s long term growth
• Work out the return on investment (ROI) of your SEO proposal
• Define the workload and the roadmap for achieving your goals
• Track your progress, measure the SEO results (via web analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Omniture) and report regularly to the executives

Site Ownerships

The corporate web site may be divided into multiple sections in which each team has ownership and management responsibility of a particular section. For example, each team probably manages the daily operations of one of the following sections:

• Homepage
• Product categories and sub-categories
• New product section
• Product pages
• Purchase / conversion Flow
• Community, forum and customer-review sections

The operational managers of the different website sections are the decision makers who ensure the work gets done across the resources they have on hand. These teams decide what content goes on to their own sections and they may have their own content creators and copy writers.

At this level, your SEO team’s job is not only to implement the SEO strategies you have set out, but is to also influence and educate the “site owners”. You will have to find the common goals among your team and each site owner team, and start working towards the goals with the support and resources of the site owner teams.

SEO is not all about ranking in the SERP, so along the line you will have to optimize your conversion flow via web page A/B testing tools such as Google Website Optimizer.

Web Development and Design Resources

The IT department often is where the design and web development resources are, and can be one of the opponents to the SEO team. Even though you may already have executives’ permissions in using resources, you will still have to reserve your web development and design resources in advance.

SEO Best Practices

As Google’s search market share has grown rapidly in the last couple of years, it would make sense to optimize your web site for Google’s ranking algorithm. For the good SEO performance to last, everyone will need to follow a set of search engine optimization standards. Your SEO team must create a best practice guide such as Google SEO for Beginners in which people within the corporation will refer to and follow.

Gordon Choi: Thank Stephen for taking the time to share your thoughts. Can you tell me a little about your online marketing and consulting experience?

Stephen Noton: I started online in 1997, went straight into ecommerce selling automotive racing parts online.  I was only 19 so while I understood the Internet I didn’t have a good understanding of the business side, so after a year I sold off the assets of the company and started into consulting and marketing for other companies on the Internet.  11 years later I’m still doing consulting and working on some of my own passions, which still include car racing.

Gordon Choi: Google’s organic search algorithm has been changing so much in the past several years. Some of the factors once allowed a site to rank well can no longer apply. Where do you see Google applying more weight on the algorithm?

Stephen Noton: Google is getting away from their focus on external links as they are building up more and more signs of a good website.  Google Trends for websites is a good public example of how Google can track the traffic, use, and possible value of a website rather then just looking at links.  When you think about it back links are not the most effective way of assigning value, offline marketing, repeat customers, and traditional WOM (word of mouth) are all excluded if you just look at links.

Gordon Choi: Do you think webmasters should spend their time on creating valuable contents instead of spend large amount of money buying links? Why?

Stephen Noton: Other than the focus on links another misconception on the Internet is creating more and more content, while content is good, too much content can actually harm your focus and your goals.  But your comment on creating “valuable” content is correct, people should be focused on creating, maintaining and improving the content their audiences wants.

Gordon Choi: With those companies you have worked with, what were the major SEO problems they commonly had?

Stephen Noton: It is usually a technology issue, most websites’ backend where built without thoughts of the users and SEO, so correcting a backend for a major website is often a major issue.  Some websites have started from scratch others have patched their systems but the best companies start out with the user in mind long before any coding is done.

Gordon Choi: From your experience working with SEO teams of many companies across the world, do you find it easy or difficult to give SEO consulting and training? If it is difficult, what have been the major obstacles and how have you been overcoming them?

Stephen Noton: I have the unique challenge of language barrier in a lot of my training, so that’s probably the biggest issue.  Other than that training is actually relatively easy as SEO is all about logic.  So often all you need to do is outline the process and the how’s & why’s and 99% of the team can follow.  Overcoming the language barrier is hard, but using drawings, simpler English and the help of a good translator I’ve been able to train in English, Thai, Vietnamese, & Chinese.

Gordon Choi: Some businesses were created without SEO in mind at the first place and they mostly do not believe in SEO or at least do not think SEO is important. How would you go about to convince them SEO will actually help their businesses?

Stephen Noton: A lot of people think SEO is some magic dust or something that only has to do with the coding, but actually it’s all about the user, so when I meet a company that doesn’t understand SEO I walk them through what a good SEO website is and how SEO and usability are almost the same functions.

Gordon Choi: What are the criteria for picking a good domain name?

Stephen Noton: Be something that can become a brand, all too often I see websites being created that have no hope of long term success, simply due to their domain being unbrandable.  While some will say anything can become a brand, I also know that one day scientist might just get pigs to fly but I’d put my efforts into a domain that is: one word/brand name, less then 3 syllables, .com (international/US website) and of course no dashes.

Gordon Choi: What advices will you give anyone who is to buy an existing site that already possesses some level of fame?

Stephen Noton: If possible keep the previous owner on staff/part of the website for 3 months to 1 year.  This will help prevent them walking off with your users, will make the transition to new management within the user base easier and will allow you to learn more about how the site became a success. There is nothing better then watching someone in action to learn, no book or no course can teach you what you can learn by watching someone’s natural ability/instinct.

Gordon Choi: What advices do you have for web sites that are to target the global audience?

Stephen Noton: It’s a big world, think twice before trying to go global, especially if you are trying to sell a product.  Marketing, branding and logistically managing a global project is very costly and time consuming.  Very few companies start global, Mc Donald’s and KFC both started with just 1 restaurant in 1 city, they saw that they had the right idea and the right system of operations and they grew.  This is the same for websites, eBay, Amazon, started with 1 country and even sites like Craigslist which started just in 1 city all proved their idea locally then replicated globally.

Gordon Choi: With Google dominating the search industry, do you think it is a healthy environment? Which sites / companies do you think will give the biggest threats to Google’s business model?

Stephen Noton: Google has so many business models now that it is hard for anything to compete directly with Google as a company, now Google as a search engine, yes there will be changes and there already is.  While in the US Google has the market share, outside of the US there are many countries where Google has little to no market share.  Also think about this none of the search engines that where online when I started 11 years ago are here today, yes Google is big, but thinking that there can be no other possible options in the future is like thinking that the United States is and always will be the most powerful country in the world, one thing is certain on the Internet, things always change.

Gordon Choi: SEO has changed a lot since day one and it is still changing, mostly according to how Google wants it to become. What are the important techniques / qualities that a great SEOer should possess to always keep up-to-date with the fast changing SEO industry?

Stephen Noton: Understand the basic’s of SEO, these really haven’t changed since day 1, which is make sure you have what your user wants and give your user the best experience possible.  Also understand that all search engines even Google are mathematical formula’s and every formula can be understood, while weights/values may change in that formula the inputs/variables are consistent.

Pagerank has not been an accurate indicator to show webmasters how a particular site should be ranked comparing to other sites. Rather, many experienced webmasters and SEO experts have spotted Google, in combating search engine spams, is in favor of using trustrank and domain age to rank websites in the SERP.

SEO is easier than ever and will become a commodity within the next couple of years, as all the optimization rules have been clearly defined and have become standard practices. SEO and web site usability will be consolidated and integrated into each individual company’s business. Web developers and designers will be required to have full set of knowledge on SEO on-page optimization. Branding for a site will become an essential strategy to compliment SEO for gaining trust and popularity from Google.

The future prospects for today’s SEO experts will depend on whether they possess a broad enough scope to evolve their knowledge – what works on the web and what the customers want most from a web site. A person’s full-packaged Internet marketing experience today will become tomorrow’s solid expertise.

When natural search ranking cannot be guaranteed as easily as in the past, Google leaves another effective search engine marketing channel open to search engine marketers – PPC. Those in the SEM industry who are able to overcome the challenges for paid search in 2008 will continue to shine.

2007-05-15: ver 1.19 – Compete.com added! Compete ranking for the current domain now appears in a new bar alongside PageRank and Alexa Rank, with estimated visitors in the menu (can be disabled if not desired). Alexa queries improved to ensure inclusion into Alexa’s toolbar users panel.

Besides the newly added Compete Ranking, the Search Status toolbar already allows webmasters to view Google Pagerank, Alexa ranking and backlinks from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.

Download the toolbar here if you do not have it on your Firefox browser, or wait for the extension update the next time you open up Firefox if you are an existing SearchStatus toolbar user.

Consider the three points below which will make your web pages easily followed by the search engine spider.

Check the directory depth of your site

You should evaluate the directory depth of your web pages. It is always good to avoid creating very deep directory structures in which your web page files are stored. The bad example will look like:

http://www.gordonchoi.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/index.html

A better example will be:

http://www.gordonchoi.com/dir1/index.html

The reasons are that,

• Deep directory structures are difficult to crawl by search engine spiders.
• Deep directory structures are rarely crawled by search engine robots.

Check the link structure of your website

It is important to create a website with link structures that can easily be crawled by search engine spiders. Some websites have been created with search engine unfriendly navigation structures. For example links in Javascript or links on image maps may not be followed by the robots.

If you cannot avoid using Javascript navigation, then the best way is to make a simple text navigation menu at the bottom of your pages.

Check your file name convention

Include your keywords in your file names, instead of naming your files as page1.html, page2.html, and so on. If you do a search on Google for any particular item, you should see that wherever your search keyword appears it is listed in the Google results in bold text. You should normally see this bold text in the title text that is displayed, and in the descriptive text that Google displays under the title text. You should also see it in the URL, if you have included your keywords in the file names. It is even better if you already have some of your keywords in your domain name.

Some webmasters do go further in separating their keywords by hyphens in the file names. This is a good practice but is not absolutely necessary anymore. Nowadays the major search engines are able to recognize keywords within longer text blocks, as this is called keyword stemming.

Check your dynamically created web pages

This is a bonus point. If you are making use of many dynamically generated pages, you may also want to read Crawlability Of Dynamically Created Pages.

SEO is definitely one of the least expensive marketing channel, even if not the cheapest. It can take longer comparing to other methods like PPC advertising, but it is a channel that cannot be ignored.

Whether your marketing strategies consist of an SEO component or not, the following stages of online marketing will always apply:

Stage 1: Increase Traffic Volume

Let say your website provides a service for a small fee. The first obvious thing to do is always to increase the website traffic. Without traffic, it makes no difference whether your service is really good or not.

Depending on your budgets, human resources and skills, whether through SEO or not, at this stage you should always try as much to increase traffic volume to your site.

Stage 2: Improve Site Traction

Once your site has a steady traffic volume, it has traction. It means your audiences love your service and what you are offering. Now your steady audiences have become your repeated visitors.

When your website reaches this stage, you will find ways to bring in more traffic. You will want to work on refining some details on your site which you may have ignored in the past. You will even set goals on increasing your traffic volume by a certain amount each month.

Stage 3: Enhance Site Popularity

If you keep up with your good service to your loyal audiences you have acquired, they will start telling their friends about your service and website. To you this means more traffic, and this time the new source of traffic comes for free.

At this stage, you will start seeing a few competitors emerging all of a sudden simply because they think by copying what you are offering, they will be able to take a piece of your market.

At this moment, you should provide your loyal audiences and new visitors with enhancements to your existing services. Releasing relevant new services should be in consideration as this can distinguish your services to your catching-up competitors. Only by doing this continuously, you will be able to always maintain your head-start to your competitions.

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link. The best-known use for nofollow is blog comment spam, but the mechanism is completely general. Nofollow is recommended anywhere that links can’t be vouched for. If your logs analysis program shows referrers as hyperlinks, I’d recommend using nofollow on those links. If you have a wiki that anyone on the web can edit, I’d recommend nofollow on those links until you can find a way to trust those links. In general, if you have an application that allows others to add links, web spammers will eventually find your pages and start annoying you.

In combating blog comment spam, blog software providers including Wordpress, Bloggers, LiveJournal and others have since supporting this by default.

Other than blogs, as a great resource Wikipedia is one of those web properties that had been suffering from link spamming. Basically everyone is allowed to freely edit or add links to it. This led to Wikipedia introducing the nofollow attribute to its all external links. This as a whole may have killed the concept behind link popularity as no one ever gets any link weights from this resourceful site!

To appeal, certain blogs (like Marketing Pilgrim) are very against this idea of Wikipedia and even went all the way to include nofollow attribute to all outgoing links to Wikipedia.

Further support of concept of link popularity can be seen. On his blog, Vinny Lingham even went on to install a piece of software (Do Follow plugin) to disable the Wordpress default setting of the blog comments. This allows any comment links on his blog to pass link weights back to the original commentators.

Whether it is to no follow or do follow, as a blogger it is certainly your choice.

Reason #1: Failing to gather information about keyword popularity

One of the mistakes many webmasters make is to do their keyword research only once and then forget all about it. Keywords are changing in popularity all the time with some reducing in popularity while others are increasing. There is no way you can possibly stay informed without monitoring keyword popularity on a regular basis. Also, very often new keywords that lead potential customers to your websites can be discovered from time to time.

After a couple of years of SEO experience, or even a couple of months, you should notice that highly successful SEO campaigns require lots of information and research over a long period of time. In order to keep up with your competition, you must always be in the position of gathering as much information as possible for your SEO campaign.

Reason #2: Focusing on the wrong markets

In the world of Internet, many webmasters tend to compete in very competitive markets, and are not able to find their niche markets. Very often is that when everyone is in, you want to share a piece of it as well. Most webmasters who are in the highly competitive markets have so far failed. Experience and history can tell you that by focusing on some niche markets, webmasters have much higher chance of making successful businesses.

Also because of having chosen one of the very competitive markets to start off with, many webmasters tend to give up easily once they have encountered difficulties.

Reason #3: Making duplicate content across your multiple websites

Duplicated Content is one of the problems we all face on the web. Basically, duplicated content gives user a bad experience besides the major search engines do not value it. It makes things worse when you own all those websites that share very similar content. Google’s Matt Cutts reviewed some websites and warned about using duplicate content across your multiple websites at the 2006 Pubcon.

“The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection.”

The bottom line is that you should not duplicate content on your websites, as you can be penalized by the search engines. Apart from that, look at it from the user perspective. No one wants to read the same thing more than once.

Reason #4: Treating all industries the same

The common belief is that if a webmaster succeeds in the SEO of a certain business in a certain industry, he will be successful in any industry and any business.

Experienced SEO experts do tend to fall into this trap. A webmaster could have made a successful SEO campaign on his web hosting business website, but once he moved on to his next business which can be a real estate business website, he failed.

The truth is that one business can be very different from another. Very often the effort required to get a certain website at the top of search engine rankings is very different from the effort required to get another different site to the same level.

There are categories in which the competition is so tough. Also, the number of competing websites can be so numerous that it is virtually impossible to carry out any successful SEO campaign without adjusting a few things such as focusing a different niche of target market.

I am sure it can be painful for some SEO professionals who have been approached by clients with big brand websites but have the 3 false perceptions below.

False Perception #1: Select a few keywords and optimize them for rankings

When launching SEO campaign for a website, several keywords are identified beforehand, in which they are supposed to be the top keywords. Definite goals are set to rank the selected keywords in the SERP.

However, too often plans like these failed miserably. There is nothing wrong with the search engine optimization techniques that were applied. The truth is that keywords being logically picked are often very competitive keywords in competitive industries. The chance for these keywords to rank in the top 10 of the search engine result pages is almost zero. So forget about identifying top keywords and forget about setting goals for them.

If you are optimizing for a website with a big brand, the site will already have hundreds of thousands of web pages. Even when your top keywords are not ranked in the top 20, your site will still receive extremely high volume of traffic collectively from hundreds of thousands of different search queries.

False Perception #2: Hire an SEO guy to work full time

This approach looks right, if the work is to be done on small websites. For a big brand with a large website, the SEO work cannot be solely done by a single person. Also, by hiring a person who knows only the theories of SEO will never be good enough. There are too many details to take care of: keyword research and analysis, site structure, site design, script programming, testing, and many others.

When the professional plans the SEO strategies, he must first consider from the business point of view. There is pointless when designing a website that can rank well in SERP but will not sell.

False Perception #3: Pay for the SEO services only when you see positive results

Great SEO professionals will not accept to only get paid after showing positive results. The experts who will accept such a deal are not true expertise in search engine optimization.

This can be a risky business approach by the large websites or websites with big brand names, they will definitely not be able to afford any huge drop in search engine traffic. If this happens it will only cause a business to lose hundreds of thousands of revenues.

The right approach for the big brand names is to ask the SEO experts to show them successful cases when optimizing for their other clients.

• How can you help me to improve my website ranking?
• How can you help to increase my website traffic?
• How can I increase revenues for my business via my website?

Occasionally a great SEO expert should re-think if their clients have asked the right questions, as many times clients do not necessarily ask for what they need for achieving their ultimate goals. They mainly have 2 perceptions below which can be mis-leading.

Perception #1: When keyword ranking increase, so does traffic volume

The first phase of making a SEO campaign successful is to increase a website’s keyword rankings in the search engine result pages (SERP).

Some clients may have the false impression that ranking increase of your keywords within the SERP will automatically mean more traffic will be brought to your website. However, your website can be ranked number 1 across 50 keywords and still in combination deliver your website minimal or even no traffic volume increase.

Here is another scenario. If your website original ranked 2000 in the search engine result pages for one of your main keywords in a very competitive category, and you’re only managed to improve the ranking to 500, it will certainly make little difference in your traffic volume.

The important thing to do is to perform a thorough keyword research and determine the keywords that matter to your business, before even starting your SEO campaign.

Perception #2: Brand Awareness and Higher Exposure

It takes time to build a brand whether offline or online, especially a well-known one. A good SEO campaign does not only improve traffic volume to your website, but it will improve your brand and exposure due to the fact that your website has improved in the search engine result pages. Many website owners or potential clients do not see it this way, as it often takes too long for brand awareness to be recognized.

It is nothing wrong when a SEO expert explains to his client about higher exposure and better brand awareness in the long run. For any well-known brand, the search volume of brands as keywords which has been queried via search engines are countless.

Conclusion

Very often a well-executed SEO campaign brings far more benefits than the clients could have expected beforehand, whether it is improvement in search engine rankings, traffic, exposure, or brand awareness. Once the effects of the improvement have kicked in, then the most important and ultimate goals, revenue and return-on-investment (ROI), will improve.

#1 Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important on-page factors. It is what displays as the headline in the search engine result pages.

There are two ways in writing your title tag. The first is that if you want to create brand awareness, you will place your business name (or brand) towards the beginning of the title tag. Otherwise, your main keyword phrase should be used towards the beginning.

#2 Meta Description Tag

The meta description is important as it is the text search engines display when your web page comes up in the search results.

Your meta description should be a simple sentence (or short paragraph) that describes the nature of your website. For example, if your website is for business, it should give your potential customers a good idea of what products you sell or what services you provide. You should make proper use of punctuation and write for good readability.

#3 Header Tag

Good websites always make use of header tags in proper hierarchical ways.

The text of your web page will be given more weight by the search engines if you properly make use of header tags. It will work even better by using descriptive body text below the headers.

#4 Alt Tag

The alt tag serves as a good alternative in text format in describing the images on your website, when users browse your website with browsers that don’t support images, or your website happens to be unable to properly load image files.

Many webmasters believe that the alt tag is no longer being considered for ranking purposes by some major search engines, or its effect on ranking has been considerably reduced.

#5 Anchor Tag

Anchor tag is the link text on your web pages. As search engine spiders don’t like image links, when you have image links on your pages, you must also create the corresponding text links on one other place of your web pages.

The text in your anchor tag should be descriptive and tell the users where they will be shown after clicking on the link. For example, “click here” in your anchor tag is a good way to trigger user action, but it doesn’t tell where the users will be taken to after the action is triggered.

Warning

Lastly, after reading the above beginners may want to try stuffing their main keyword phrases multiple times in all 5 tags. This is never a good idea, as firstly, your website will surely be penalized by the search engines. Again in terms of usability, it is too important to have descriptive text in your tags for your users rather than being totally meaningless.

[Google now indexes] URLs that contain that parameter [&id=]. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don’t worry about rewriting it — we’ll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you.

If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls.

So if you already have a dynamically created website, you must make sure you only use no more than two parameters within the URLs. You may want to re-write your URLs using Mod Rewrite to ensure most the search engines especially including Google will be able to index your web pages.

Check Point #1 Search engine friendly index page

It is an absolute disadvantage if the homepage (index page) of your website is not built crawlable. From time to time, I can still see quite a few websites making use of purely Flash elements on their index page. It looks fancy to human eyes, but it means nothing to search engine spiders.

As a whole, graphical intensive pages (JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc) are always problems to search engine spiders. When possible, you should have always make use of text content on your index page, so that it is crawlable by search engine spiders.

Check Point #2 Textlink navigation

Javascript navigation is a very common used technique by many webmasters. However, most search engine spiders do not follow Javascript links and image links.

If you want to ensure search engine spiders can find all your web pages then using simple text links is a must. If the Javascript links or image links cannot be removed, then simply replicate a set of text links on your web pages for search engine spiders to follow.

Check Point #3 Inbound link from external websites

Some webmasters believe that by simply submitting their websites, they will be listed within search engine result pages. In this case, I will simply get an inbound link from a web page that is already listed within search engine result pages.

Check Point #4 No problem on your web server

When a search engine spider cannot find your web pages due to web server downtime or unreliability, your web pages will not appear within search engine result pages.

You should use a reliable web server. If you are using a web server that is hosted by a web hosting company, make sure it has a high percentage of uptime such as 99.99%. Basically when your web server is very reliable, it should not return an error message when a search engine spider tries to access your web pages.

Check Point #5 No spammy content

It is difficult for your website to rank well if there is any spammy content, which includes white text on white background, text in invisible CSS elements and keyword spamming within the content or any tag. If you have any of these contents, remove them immediately.