SEO Checklist - Content

39

Unique content

Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings.

40

Frequency of content change

Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.

41

Keywords font size

When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text.

42

Keywords formatting

Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect.

43

Age of document

Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored.

44

File size

Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones.

45

Content separation

From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content of the page is.

46

Poor coding and design

Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this sense poor code and design can harm you a lot.

47

Illegal Content

Using other people’s copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.

48

Invisible text

This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don’t be surprised by the penalty.

49

Cloaking

Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.

50

Doorway pages

Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.

51

Duplicate content

When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper.