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Showing posts with the label on-page factors

Bing's "SEO Fundamentals" are everyone's fundamentals

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  As a followup perhaps to the Bing/Yahoo! quality checklist, Searchenginejournal.com subsequently provided 18 points of what Bing expects web content publishers to implement for SEO . Well, it seems to me that all their advice applies equally as well for those aiming to optimize their web content for any search engine. I think perhaps that there should have been a disclaimer associated with point 1, which concerned the implementation of robots.txt and XML site maps. It's still my understanding that both of these files only provide a set of suggestions for search engines, and their parameters may not necessarily be obeyed by crawlers. Point 8, create an RSS feed, also may imply quite a few additional points, such as that new content is expected to be published with some frequency and that said feed can be easily subscribed to by those who may not know how to hack the URL (via point 11, enablement of social media). In fact, segmented audience studies have shown that the pu

Where on-page SEO and essay writing practices coincide

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Casting my mind back to (well) over a decade ago, I still remember being taught some principles of short essay writing: The title should reflect the primary topic. As with well-formed markup language (HTML, XML), the opening and closing sentences should summarize the topic, assertion or opinion.  Each of the middle paragraphs should cover interrelated ideas that expound upon the main topic, and be ordered logically, building upon the prior paragraph. Boldface and italics can emphasize important points, though they should be used sparingly. In looking at Google's algorithm for keyword density and prominence factors, we see that they seem to expect these exact best practices in every web page in order to determine what the topic is for said page: The <title> and <h1> tags should contain the primary keyword - the prominence is also dependent upon overall length of the text strings, and the position in which it occurs. The keyword should occur in the first and closi