Business Address and Telephone Number

It is believed that engines give an additional weighting to sites that carry an address and
telephone number. In many categories there are a large number of searches made using a
national discriminator in the search term, so include your country in the address.

Content Change

Engines apparently respond positively to a degree of content change – this is why some
blogs appear high in the rankings. Apparently, Google responds positively towards
“fresh” web sites and negatively towards “stale” web sites. If content has changed
between crawling cycles it signals to the spider to return again at more frequent intervals.

Site Map

Engines respond positively to site maps especially on larger sites with several levels. The
site map is also a useful way of aiding the navigation of a spider for deep crawl purposes.

Outbound Links (Forward)

These are apparently growing in influence as the engines realise that inbound links (IBLs
– see below) are being widely spammed. Rather link internal links, external links provide
the opportunity to include keywords in the hyperlink text.

Internal Links

Inbound links are important for two reasons. Firstly, their content is highlighted with a
hyperlink and this is given special emphasis by the search engines and secondly it is a
way of ensuring the engines can navigate and deep crawl into a site.

Bold and Cursive Script

Both bold and cursive script are given extra emphasis by the search engines. A subtle use
of bold or cursive script, when using a keyword, will enhance its presence.

Alt Tags

Search engines can read the alt tags that accompany JPEG, and GIF images. Every
relevant image should have an alt tag and this tag should be written to comply with your
keyword objectives. The text in an alt tag is believed to be given additional weight.

Titles Tags

Text within title tags has a greater weighting than ordinary copy. Within HTML code
titles are marked up <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc. Therefore whenever a paragraph title is used
it is wise to use a keyword or keyword phrase.

Content Density

There is much debate about density. Too little and the keyword or phrase won’t be picked
up. Too much and your site may fail the spamming test. Some SEOs suggest repeating
keywords no more than 7 times on any one page. Density is always measured in relative
terms. A page with a lot of copy will have more word repetition than one with few words.

Content Relevance

Keywords and their surrounding copy should be relevant to one another. Certain words
and combinations of words go together and the search engine algorithms know this. So
advertising goes with marketing. Food with drink. Photographs with film. Also derivative
words with different utilisation go well. So market and marketed with marketing etc.