This is an outline of SEO requirements for any optimized webpage served to a user or a search engine. Outline is based on Google’s webmaster guidelines and known optimization techniques for ranking in the most popular search engines. Quick Overview

Redirects

• Avoid using JavaScript and http-equiv redirects. Search engines cannot follow them.
• Use 301 permanent redirects instead of 302 temporary redirects. Here is a guide to 301 redirects.
• Avoid using any redirection technique that may serve alternative pages to users (including but not limited to search engines.). “cloaking techniques”

Keep Code Clean

Messy code and extraneous code will interfere with a search engine’s ability to index a page, as well as rank page content for the most important search terms.

• Make sure a code validates to W3C standards: validator.w3.org.
• Avoid using tables and font tags to format a page. Use style sheets instead.
• Avoid placing style sheets and JavaScripts on the page (unless a site gets as many hits as Yahoo); link to them instead.
• Search engines cannot read text dynamically created with JavaScript. Present text content using HTML instead.
• The page should be able to display it’s content to a variety of common browsers, including the simple browsers used by search engines.

Meta Keyword Elements

If you have meta keywords on legacy pages, follow these rules:

• The words and phrases in a keyword list must match the words and phrases found in the body of the page, as well as search terms worth targeting.
• Keep a meta keywords in the ball park of about 25 individual words.
• Recommended keywords length is between 300 and 500 chars, river belle’s keywords length is 200.
• Meta Description Elements

Meta descriptions are crucial in two cases: • Search engines use text to describe a page. Images do not contain text and search engines may not be able to index the text in a Flash. When a page is mostly images or Flash, provide a meta description of the contents of a page. • Search engines use link text to describe the page the link goes to, but not the page the link text is on. When a page is mostly links, like a sitemap or portal, you need to provide a meta description of the contents of the page. • Recommended description length is less than or equal to 200 characters, river belle’s description length is 125 characters. • (Additional search terms can be added to the description tag, to rank in more search engine pages.) Title Elements • When a webpage appears in search results, the title text becomes the link text people click on in the search results, therefore, the page title should be simple, easy to read and enticing. • Make sure the title tags include industry keywords that reflect the contents of the page, as well as the name of a site and/or business, & match at least 3 keywords in the first heading of the page copy. • Each page should have a unique title. • Never separate the letters of the words in a titles with spaces or other characters. (it dilutes the search quality of a page titles). • Recommended title length is less than or equal to 150 characters, river belle’s title length is 40. • 5 - 7 words, 5 is better doesn't dilute, keep keywords (3 max) at beginning of the title.

Order of the Meta Data

Meta data must be placed as close to the top of the page as possible (before any script start) & be constructed in this order.

1. Content Type
2. Language
3. Title
4. Description
5. Keywords
6. Robots rule (See (Robots Rules) Below)
7. CSS
8. JavaScript’s

Images, Flash and other Multimedia Search engines are good at reading text, but they cannot read information trapped in images or video, and many struggle to read text included in Flash movies. In circumstances where a pages use images, Flash or video to convey information, you must do the following: • Ensure that page titles and meta descriptions adequately describe the contents of the page. • Ensure that images have alt and title attributes that describe the content of the images. (ensures blind users can also navigate the website. • Object elements should have descriptive title attributes. • Consider adding HTML text descriptions of multimedia to a pages. • Use descriptive link text when linking to pages comprised of mostly images, Flash or other multimedia. Links • Search engines use link text to describe the contents of the page the link points to. It is crucial to be descriptive when writing a link text copy, ensuring that you include keywords in the link text. • Never use "click here", "learn more" “more info” or other link text that contains no description of the page the link points to. • Use the keywords nearer the beginning of the anchor text. • HTML text links should be used when possible instead of image, Flash or JavaScript rendered links. • Title descriptions on text links describing the linked page are also an avenue to introduce search term rich short descriptions. Cookies, Session Variables, and Form Information • Content on pages that require cookies, session variables or form information may not be available to search engines. URLs • Include keywords in any sub-domains, directory names and file names. • Use a hyphen to separate keywords rather than a space or a combination “/casino-bonus.html” is better than “/casinobonus.html” but do not load keywords into a file name like “/new-online-casino-bonus-code-september-pormotion.html” • Avoid complex URLs. Search engines choke on complex query strings, and it is difficult for users to remember. HTTP Compression • HTTP compression allows rapid delivery of a webpage to the client’s browser or search engine database. In turn this process will enhance the overall user experience. Code, Comments & White Spaces • Do not comment code that gets processed to the browser. (Unnecessary) • Eliminate any & all white spaces in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript that are not 10000050% necessary for a valid display.(Don’t use 2 lines of code when 1 will do • Always streamline the output of code sent to the browser. JavaScript’s • Any JavaScript’s must be included in a separate external JavaScript file so that the user only downloads the file once and doesn’t need to re-download the file with each consecutive page they view. • Tracking and various other functionalities such as menu functions etc. can be maintained in the separate java script file. • JavaScript pop-ups are not recommended. • JavaScript navigational menus should be backed up by text hyperlinks for older browsers. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Reasons for designing in CSS. • Like JavaScript CSS files must be included in a separate external *.css file so that the user only downloads the file once and doesn’t need to re-download the file with each consecutive page they view. • CSS allows for the much of the on-page formatting, with the ability to reduce the quantity of on-page code. • CSS must be used to optimize the most relevant “content” on a given webpage for search engines. Different CSS techniques are adopted for depending on the page layout, it needs to be mentioned that a minimum specification of on-page text content needs to be kept in mind. • Image heavy pages with light text content should have text scrolling sections governed by CSS layer techniques which allow for more text content to be added to a page. User benefit would be that they could view the text content as they “mouse over” relevant image sections. • The pages content & header tags need to be as closely situated to the opening of the tag as possible, to optimize for the most relevant content of the page. The logic behind this is simple “the most important item of the page is loaded first”. For search engines and users this would be the “content” as the most important item of the page. The HTML page viewed without the CSS styling would look similar to a standard word document. If usability looks & feel testing needs to be deployed by switching the CSS file to display a different layout to different users rather than splitting them off onto a different webpage as is the currently adopted approach. Websites commonly use tables to do page layout. However, tables often do not allow you to place text near the beginning of the HTML. Furthermore, tables increase your html/content ratio. It's better to have more content than html. For this reason we recommend using cascaded style sheets or CSS for page layout over tables. CSS is extremely dynamic and versatile. Complex layouts are attainable if desired. However, one drawback is backward compatibility with older browsers. Cross-browser support and backward compatibility becomes a little tricky if your not careful. It involves a few workarounds, but is well worth it, not only for SEO but for simplicity and manageability. Page Content • H1 The most important content heading. Repeat main keywords at top of opening tag. 200 characters max, less than 140 recommended. • H2 - H6 Use keywords in these subheadings where it makes sense for your content. Don' stuff your content by overusing keywords in headings. • On-Page Word Count Word count of 400 - 600 words for main content, 500 - 800 for total word count. • Keyword Density. Use your important key phrases in text links to your pages. Keep keyword density for the page around 5% - 10%. This is the number of times a keyword is used divided by the number of words on the page. • Keyword position & prominence. Place keywords at the beginning, middle and end of the main body content. • Bold and Italicizing keywords (when possible) will add a small boost to your page's keyword relevance. • Keyword proximity use keywords and keyword derivations close together throughout the content. To increase search engine matches for various search phrases. • Page Size: Typically pages less than 100k are recommended. Image size should be less than 50k. Don't use more than 3 - 5 images on an optimized page. The idea is to allow the page to load fast. Many people still use dialup connections. You will be penalized for slow loading pages. Having said that, there is some debate on the optimal page size. Therefore I recommend using pages throughout the website that vary in size, some significantly smaller than 99k and some larger. Since some SE's prefer larger pages and others small, the idea is to diversify: offer a buffet of different sized pages throughout your site. This way, all SE's will find something they like. • Don't use frames or i-frames: Search engine spiders have a hard time crawling websites that make use of frames. Worse yet, some ignore frames entirely. Don't use frames if you want to optimize your site. • Link to Homepage: Use internal links to your homepage and other on-site pages with relevant keywords in the anchor text. But keep website structure and navigation as simple as possible, navigational add-ons such as bread-crumb links & or linking the brand logo to the homepage. • Drop-Down or Pull-Down Menus: Websites should use XHTML and CSS style sheets to present drop-down or pull-down menu navigation so that the search engines will still see the href links when indexing the web page. If this type of navigational scheme uses a CGI script or JavaScript it is not easy for search engine crawlers, and the links may not be indexed. Proper website structure helps search engines index & crawl a site and discover keywords related to. A theme-based website structure must be uncomplicated and employ simple navigation. Links more than three pages deep in your site navigation may not be crawled by the search engine spiders. Every page in the website should be part of a hierarchy. The homepage should link to at least five related pages beneath itself. Each of these sub-pages should also link to five or more related pages. Consider this as an absolute minimum. The more pages a site has, the better chance it will have of showing up in the search engines for different search terms. The homepage should focus on a general overall site theme. As you navigate deeper into the hierarchy, pages should deliver more detailed information, focusing on a specific topic of the overall theme. A page should link to pages above and below itself. In addition, linking to any page that is highly related in theme is recommended. However, do not abuse this second part. It's better to have simple navigation than to link every related page together. Site Map A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map? Robots Rules A robots.txt file needs to be included into the root directory of every production domain, allowing all search engine spiders to access all content pages. This is a better option of defining robot’s rules than in the page meta as the command does not need to be executed by the browser when loading the page to the browser. Search engines automatically query the website for this file which is why it needs to exist in the root folder. http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html Alternatively a robots rules can be outset in the “meta” tags of any webpage. Domain Consolidation All relevant alternative domains need to be permanently 301 redirected to their respective production domain. This process will secure secondary domains will pass the page rank & back links that they have previously achieved to the production domain, as well as start eliminating any duplicate content penalties currently occurred in search engines.