Meta Description
The meta description tag is an element search engines use to help
determine what the page is about. The tag also appears as your site
description in search results, so writing your tag to appeal to human
eyes can lead to increased clicks on your listing. You will notice
that the search engine bolds the keywords you originally searched for
in the description tag. If you do not have a description tag, Google
will write one for you, and you really don't want that.
Google PageRank
Your Google PageRank (toolbar PageRank is between 0 and 10 - the higher,
the better) is basically a measure of trust and authority. Domains with
a higher PR are likely to rank for more terms than sites with low PR.
Alexa Rank
Your Alexa Rank is actually a measure of traffic to your site where
they rank your site compared to all other sites in the world. If
your site is in the top 100,000 Alexa rank, your traffic is probably
doing OK. For example, pearanalytics.com floats between 47,000 and
75,000.
Title Tag
The title tag is an element that the search engines use to help
determine what the page is about. Since it shows up as the first
line of your listing in search results, it can make or break your
clicks if it does not sound appealing to people. A concise and
appropriate title tag projects an image of professionalism as
well as encourages users to bookmark your page, knowing they
won't have to edit text to remember what they bookmarked.
Robots.txt
Your robots.txt file, located in your root folder, is a way for webmasters
to indicate which pages/folders/directories should not be accessed by
crawlers or search engines. A good example are any pages behind a login.
However, there are some serious misuses of the robots file that we come
across sometimes, and we want to try and alert you to those. Overusing
or blocking too many sections of your site could cause harm to your
inbound link effectiveness.
Page Load Time
Having slow loading pages can affect your rankings, and ultimately
your traffic. Even the traffic you do get may bounce at a higher rate
on slow loading pages. If you have an e-commerce site, expect a
loss in sales for pages that load too slowly.
Clean URL
Use clean URLs and add targeted keywords where you can to enhance the
SEO friendliness of your site. You will notice search engines will
highlight those pages in the results, so having pages that are
descriptive is better than random characters and number sequences,
which is almost always the case. But be careful about pages that have
affiliate codes or ID's in them. If they are duplicate copies of
existing pages on the site, you want to be sure the search engine
is not seeing these affiliate pages as duplicate content. You can
"NOINDEX" them if necessary.
Domain Age
A young domain will likely not rank well immediately depending on
competitiveness, unless there is a major social or viral event to
drive a massive amount of traffic to the site in a short period of
time. Domain age is used in the "trust and authority" calculation
the search engine does. Also, purchase your domain out to 5 or 10
years instead of just 1 or 2 years at a time. That makes the search
engine comfortable that you plan on being around a while.
Analytics
While this won't affect your traffic, it is what you need to measure
YOUR traffic.
