This post is part 2 of the list of items that you want to avoid when tyring to improve your site’s SEO.

• Don’t have excessive javascript or flash on your pages. Spiders have trouble reading this content.
• Don’t use frames on your page.
• Don’t try to fool the search engine with invisible text or text that is the same color as the background. Most spiders can recognize this now and will penalize you for it.
• Don’t have links on your site to unrelated websites or other “bad” sites like link farms or known spam sites.

As you probably know, there is much more to SEO now than just these on-the-page factors. Next week, we will explore some of the most important positive and negative off-page factors that are considered by Google when ranking your site.

While there are various things that you can do to improve your ranking in Google, there are also several things that you want to avoid. The following is a list of some on-the-page SEO items to avoid.

• Text presented in graphic form only. This provides very little information to the search engines. If you have to use text graphics, be sure to at least include an “alt” tag.
• Don’t use redirects thru refresh metatags.
• Avoid bad language and ethnic slurs.
• Stealing images/text blocks from other sites. Google responds very strongly if you are reported for copyright violations.
• Keyword dilution- Targeting too many unrelated keywords on a page can negatively impact your important keywords.

Stay tuned for more negative SEO factors in part 2.

Part 2 of the on-the-page SEO factors relates to improvements you can make that are not related to specific keywords. These suggestions will hopefully increase your website’s rankings in Google on a more general level.

1. Check Your Links!- Be sure to use a link checker tool to validate all of your links. Google is not a fan of broken links.
2. Site Structure-Try to structure your site so that any key webpage can be reached within 2 clicks. If this isn’t possible, definitely try to keep all pages within 4 clicks.
3. Monitor Outgoing Links-Do your best to monitor any outgoing links from your site to make sure that you aren’t linked to any linkfarms or other negative sites. Check all links occasionally because good links can go bad.
4. Avoid Link Churn- Google prefers to see link stability in your site’s outgoing links.
5. Use Hyphens For Spaces in URLs-If you need to indicate a space in your page’s URL, use a hyphen instead of an underscore or other character.
6. Keep Pages Fresh- Google likes fresh pages (pages that are updated regularly) and also considers the ratio of new to old pages. This is why blogs are so well liked.

Generally speaking, try to keep your website updated as often as possible and make sure to keep your content fresh and unique. Stay tuned to learn of some of the negative SEO on-the-page items to avoid.

This is the first of several posts about the factors that Google uses to rank pages in the SERPs. These tips and factors are based primarily on research and posts on some of the top webmaster forums. This first post deals with the factors relating to keywords that are considered to be positive on-the-page SEO techniques.

1. Keyword in URL or domain name- It is thought that having a keyword actually in your domain name or webpage url will boost your Google rankings for that word.
2. Keyword in the Title tag- It is very helpful to include your targeted keyword within the title tag for the page.
3. Keyword in H1, H2, and H3 tags- Be sure to use the appropriate header tag on your page and make sure that your keyword appears at least within the H1 tag.
4. Keyword in Bold or Italics-Try to bold or italicize your keyword at some point on your page. It give an indication that the word or phrase is important and relevant to the page.
5. Keyword in outgoing link anchor text-Many webmasters believe that you can benefit by using your keywords in the anchor text for links leading to other relevant web pages.
6. Image Alt Text- Try to use your keywords in the Alt attribute for images. Be careful not to overdo it though or you could get flagged as spam.

These keyword related items are believed to help increase a page’s standing with Google. Try to incorporate as many of these as possible, while keeping things natural looking. Our next post in this series will go into other positive things you can do to boost your on-the-page SEO.