We recently went through every SEO and web design client we have had in the last couple of years to see what was working for them and what wasn’t working for them. The results were not too surprising, but we had to do it to see for ourselves what was working and what wasn’t for our clients.
First we looked at our biggest successes. We have quite a few clients with first page placement in the Google search results for their main key words. We took ten of those clients and did an analysis of what was working for them.
Of the ten clients we looked at, all ten of them also had great rankings at Yahoo and MSN for the same keywords. What that means: standard SEO aimed primarily at Google rubs off on Yahoo and MSN. You don’t need to do anything special just for them.
Only 2 of the 10 we looked at have completely valid HTML code. So the validity of the HTML code seems to make no difference for SEO purposes.
Of the 10 sites, 5 have fully valid CSS code. Again, this factor doesn’t appear to make a big difference.
Of the 10, 9 have an optimized site map (using links that have title attributes on all the links, and where the links to the pages contain the key words as the underlined text. So this factor (title attributes in site maps) does appear to help with the SEO
Much more to come on this analysis, including what doesn’t appear to work any more.
hi jere, thanks for all you work and sharing. this site is truley a wealth of info.
one question, “using links that have title attributes on all the links, and where the links to the pages contain the key words as the underlined text”
does this mean that in the sitemap, use title attributes on all the links within the sitemap? what should they say?
so the hypertext on the sitemap used to link to the actual page that will contain those same keywords.
i’m a newbie at this jere. any help would be appreciated. thank you for all your knowledge.
tim
That post is nearly two years old, but still applies.
The human-friendly sitemap (not to be confused with the sitemap.xml file specifically set up for the search engines) should have links to all the pages of the site on it.
Each of those links should use the keyword of the page it points to, as the underlined link text.
For example, a link from a sitemap to a page about bungee cords would use, as the underlined link text, the words “bungee cords”.
It could say something like, “See our page about bungee cords.
The link would look like this ( without all the extra spaces ) :
< a href = " bungee-cords.html " title = " bungee cords " > bungee cords < / a >
Good luck with this – it’s a technique that really seem to help to tell Google what the page is about.