What are the common sense SEO practices that aren't dodgy or crap?

Question

PREFACE: If this question is redundant feel free to delete/close whatever. Based off of what I've seen on SO I don't think it is but it could be that questions of this nature get closed.

I hate SEO. At best it's lame, at worst it's a scam.

However when designing sites that need to be consumed by the public, it's something to take into consideration. Stack Overflow does it - that's what those words at the end of the URL are for. And it works - Stack Overflow is outranking that... other site.

But I know that outside of snake oil salesmen with their link farms, the best things you can do for SEO are:

1. Have the most relevant site, text-wise, on your topic for given search terms, and
2. Have at least implemented some common sense stuff.

So, bearing in mind that I'm not talking about a scam here, what are the common sense SEO techniques a web developer needs to keep in mind when designing or working on a site? I would think things like

1. Get familiar with Google Sitemaps and make sure to update them regularly, writing a tool for it if necessary
2. Use keywords in the title of the page (which I think is lame but it's necessary)
3. Use proper HTML - <strong> instead of <b>, etc.
4. Don't implement important text-based sections in Flash - Google will probably not see them and if it does, it'll screw it up.
5. Don't use JavaScript for redirection - Google's crawlers will just skip it

Anything else?

Answer 1

Content, Content, CONTENT! Create worthwhile content that other people will want to link to from their sites.

Answer 2

Don't implement important text-based sections in Flash - Google will probably not see them and if it does, it'll screw it up.

Google can Index Flash. I don't know how well but it can. :)

Answer 3

In addition to having quality content, content should be added/updated regularly. I believe that Google (an likely others) will have some bias toward the general "freshness" of content on your site.

Also, try to make sure that the content that the crawler sees is as close as possible to what the user will see (can be tricky for localized pages). If you're careless, your site may be be blacklisted for "bait-and-switch" tactics.

Answer 4

A well organized, easy to navigate, hierarchical site.

Answer 5

Google has the best tools for webmasters, but remember that they aren't the only search engine around. You should also look into Bing and Yahoo!'s webmaster tool offerings (here are the tools for Bing; here for Yahoo). Both of them also accept sitemap.xml files, so if you're going to make one for Google, then you may as well submit it elsewhere as well.

Google Analytics is very useful for helping you tweak this sort of thing. It makes it easy to see the effect that your changes are having.

Google and Bing both have very useful SEO blogs. Here is Google's. Here is Bing's. Read through them--they have a lot of useful information.

Meta keywords and meta descriptions may or may not be useful these days. I don't see the harm in including them if they are applicable.

If your page might be reached by more than one URL (i.e., www.mysite.com/default.aspx versus mysite.com/default.aspx versus www.mysite.com/), then be aware that that sort of thing sometimes confuses search engines, and they may penalize you for what they perceive as duplicated content. Use the link rel="canoncial" element to help avoid this problem.

Adjust your site's layout so that the main content comes as early as possible in the HTML source.

Understand and utilize your robots.txt and meta robots tags.

When you register your domain name, go ahead and claim it for as long of a period of time as you can. If your domain name registration is set to expire ten years from now rather than one year from now, search engines will take you more seriously.

As you probably know already, having other reputable sites that link to your site is a good thing (as long as those links are legitimate).

I'm sure there are many more tips as well. Good luck!