General SEO advice thread

[Thor]

Hi, I want this thread to be used for passing on valuable SEO and general optimization advice for Web Development.

Topics I would like to start with to get input on is the following:

#1 Meta Tags - Which is important and which not(why).
#2 Tag lengths for instance the Title Tag should be 50-60 characters according to most SEO tools I test with, but I see many popular websites going more than double that.
#3 www.example vs example.com ( Also does this count as duplicate content )
#4 Schema.org (structured data) importance and how to use it.
#5 Alt Tags on images - Important yes or no(why)
#6 Crawling and Indexing + Google Webmasters does one need this?
#7 etc
#8 etc

 

[koeksGHT]

 

[Thor]

snipples

Do you have a high res picture cause I can't see shiat

 

[Wall]

awesome Infographic, thanks for this

 

[Wall]

Do you have a high res picture cause I can't see shiat

file is 2mb, opens fine on my side, are you zooming in because its a long infographic.

 

[koeksGHT]

Original is 7. Imgur resized I think

 

[TehStranger]

I felt the need to quite this image again.

 

[realbigdreamer]

That is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing! I recently discovered this tool which is basic, but still allows one to quickly find possible SEO issues.

 

[Raithlin]

Guys, please stop quoting the image post!! :erm:

So some common mistakes people make when spending time on SEO is considering the meta keyword tag. Do not mix this with the keyword being searched for on Bingle (Bing / Google). The keywords meta-tag was over-used, massively, by spammers, to the point where Google and Bing (to a lesser extent) ignore this tag - and as seen above may actually hurt your rankings.

example.com vs www.example.com - General feeling is to have both set up, but have one (www) do a 301 redirect to the other. As a safety net, use Google Webmaster Tools (Yes, use this tool!!) to set the primary domain as canonical. (There is also the ref="canonical" link tag once can use in the header, but I prefer the Tools Google and Microsoft provide).

 

[Thor]

Do you guys pay attention to the character limits for title and description tags that Google uses?

 

[Pixelbender]

Do you guys pay attention to the character limits for title and description tags that Google uses?

I do try and keep it in limits. But won't fret if its 3-5 characters over the limit.

 

[Thor]

I do try and keep it in limits. But won't fret if its 3-5 characters over the limit.

Cool cool so google wont penalise you?

 

[Pixelbender]

Cool cool so google wont penalise you?

Im not sure. But doubt it if it is actually relevant and they can see youve put in some effort to keep it concise.

 

[Thor]

Im not sure. But doubt it if it is actually relevant and they can see youve put in some effort to keep it concise.

Just elaborate what you mean by "doubt it's relevant"

Are you referring to character limits or the actual keyword dense title and description tags.

 

[Pixelbender]

Just elaborate what you mean by "doubt it's relevant"

Are you referring to character limits or the actual keyword dense title and description tags.

If its relevant content in the title and description, i doubt that google will penalise you, even if you did have to go over the limit.

I bet they have several algos to keep that one (meta algo) in check. So when people think its only 200, theres probably 200 smaller ones keeping 1 of the 200 main ones in check.

Just a guess.