otterbein.edu

The title will be displayed in search engine results in the form of a direct link to the site.

Tips:
1. ideally, the title should contain 10 to 70 characters, including spaces. (Google displays up to 70 characters in the title, and takes into account only the first 12 words.)
2. put the most important and relevant keywords in the title, try not to repeat any word.
3. each individual page should have a unique title.

Meta Descriptions provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages, that are commonly used by search engines on search result pages to display preview snippets for a given page.

Tips:
1. it is best to keep meta descriptions between 70-160 characters.
2. a readable, compelling description using important keywords can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to the given web page.
3. avoid keyword stuffing, ensure each page has its own unique description.

an optimized SERP snippet will have a higher click through rate.

Tips:
1. make sure the title is clear, simple, straight to the point.
2. make sure the description is relevant and properly summarized the page content.

keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.


Tips:
1. the optimum keyword density to be 1.0% - 3.0%. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam.
2. overuse of keywords, a practice called keyword stuffing, will cause a web page to be penalized.

Declare the language in use can help search engine to better understand and rendering your page, especially when special characters are encountered.

Declare the character encoding can help search engine to better rendering your page, especially when it comes to
non-asii characters.

Robots.txt file can be used to regulate access of search engine crawlers, properly configured robots.txt file can help
crawlers to better understand your website.

Tips:
1. grand robots access to those pages you wish them to crawl.
2. restrict access to those pages you do not wish search engines to see and crawl.

Site speed is becoming an crucial ranking factor. Slow page loading is one of the biggest complains of web users. If the loading time is too long, you may need to check your server, network, or system codes and structure.

Tips:
1. ideal loading time is less than 1 seconds, if it take more than 5 seconds to load your site, likely users will run out of patience, so do search engines.
2. improve your SEO by optimizing your website to have a small size and faster responding server.

Page size affects the speed of your website.

Tips:
1. try to keep you page size between 30K-150K
2. put javascript and style sheet in separate files, and link them to the main page.
3. use optimized images for web and set up your server with gzip for downloading

the ratio of text to HTML code should always be above 15% for good SEO gain,
it is below 15% then that means that your website probably needs more text content.

Tips:
1. a ratio between 25% and 70% is ideal, when it goes beyond than that, the page might run the risk of being considered as spam. As long as the content is relevant and gives essential information, it is a plus point to have more of it.
2. improve your SEO by adding more relevant text to your pages and also increasing your keyword density.

Flash content can not be properly indexed by search engines, and normally flash file is large in size, which slow down the loading of your page.

Tips:
1. avoid flash content whenever possible if you wish to have a fast and SEO friendly website.

Framesets and individual frames could cause problem for search engine to crawl your pages

Tips:
1. avoid frames whenever possible.
2. search engines do not like frames.
3. use iframe instead if you really have no choice.

nested tables could slow down page rendering and lead to bad user experience.

Tips:
1. avoiding <table> for your page layout.
2. using <div> instead of <table>.

Search Engines treat URLs with or without "www" as two different records.

Tips:
1. edit your .htaccess file and permanently redirect one to the other (eg redirect www.mysite.com to mysite.com).

clean, short and relevant URLs are favoured by users and search engines

Tips:
1. use url rewrite to turn dynamic pages with query parameters into seo friendly static pages.
2. put your important keywords in the url.
3. good urls are not only user friendly but also seo friendly.

Search Engines treat hyphen as word separator, they do not treat underscore as word separator.


Tips:
1. use hyphen "-" instead of underscore "_" to optimize your page url.
2. help search engines to better understand your url, eventually will benefit your page`s ranking.

Having a blog is a great way to provide fresh content and retain users, search engines favour it too.


Tips:
1. regularly update your blog and provide fresh and quality content.
2. relevant blogs of your website topics, generate more credits in the eyes of your visitors, as well as search engines.

Users are concerned about the safety of their online transactions. Trustworthiness rating is based on real user ratings and that tells you how much other users trust this site, so do the serch engines. note: this trustworthiness score is provided by WOT (Web of Trust).

Tips:
1. pay attention to the look and design of your site, many people look for visual cues when assessing a site`s credibility
2. make your site easy to use, sites that are easy to navigate are perceived as being more trustworthy.
3. make it easy for user to contact you, users will be more comfortable and feel more secured shall they need to get in touch with you.

Ensure that your site is malware free and does not cause harm to users` computers.

Tips:
1. do not put virus, malicious worms, adwares, trojans, spywares and suspicious phishing code in your server.
2. take suspicious behaviours seriously, have a regular check-up and monitor closely of your server`s log files.
3. if your site is black-listed by Google as suspicious, clean it up before requesting for a review.

Too many domains hosted on the same server is an indicator that you are not really serious about your website, and your site will have a higher chance to be surrounded by bad neighbours.

Tips:
1. the fewer domains hosted on the same server/ip the better.
2. avoid shared hosting whenever possible, especially when there are already hundreds or thousands of sites are hosted on the same server.
3. dedicated ip or resources for your site not only do good to your site visitors but also favoured by search engines.

A secure and safe server is not only good for your site visitors but also good for search engines.

Tips:
1. server software version information can be utilized by malicious visitors to attack your server.
2. by turning off the server signature, you actually have made your server a little bit more secure.
3. for Apache server - edit the apache2.conf or the .htaccess file to turn server signature off.

domain name choice and domain age are crucial for SEO.

Tips:
1. keep the domain name short and relevant to the content, which will be easier to be remembered and related to.
2. older domain tends to be more trustworthy.
3. register a domain for more than 1 year, and search engine will think it is a serious business.