When I first wrote my article called a proper foundation for search results back in 2004, I admit that really had no idea that there were so many other factors involved in rankings. That article morphed into an entire SEO 101 section in 2006, but even that isn’t complete, because things are always changing, and there’s always more to learn.

What follows here are 10 more search ranking factors for the intermediate level SEO, and should be easy to understand. However, please leave any questions or comments for clarification, or feel free to offer more input if you like…

11. Robots.txt –
The robots.txt file has become a standard way of giving instructions to the search engines concerning your website, and it’s also an effective way of telling them where your XML site map is. You can read a lot more about the robots file here but the most important thing to remember, is simply that you need to have one.

If you have a robots.txt file, then your site won’t be generating 404 errors every time the search engines look for the file, and fewer 404 errors are a good thing.

A typical robots.txt file will show the spiders the location for the XML site map, and then disallow any directories that the site owner doesn’t want crawled, by either all spiders, or just certain user agents. For example, the following three lines may constitute an entire robots file:

Sitemap: http://www.pdxtc.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin

If you’re not comfortable with the syntax, here is a free tool for generating your own Robots file…

12. Use an XML Sitemap -
The XML site map has become the de facto standard for ensuring all that of your pages get crawled. There are multiple free utilities and websites available for creating your XML site map, like…
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
http://www.sitemapdoc.com/
but you need to keep in mind that this is NOT the same thing as number 7 in my top 10 SEO factors; a static site map.

No human will likely ever look at this file, and instead, you will upload it to your website, and then “tell” the search engines that it exists via your robots.txt file, and by manually submitting it through Google’s Webmaster tools.

13. Permanent 301 Redirects -
The actual file names (pagename.html) should not be changed if it can be avoided, and pages & sections should NEVER be deleted entirely from your website without redirecting spiders and humans to another page on your site.

Missing pages create 404 (page not found) errors, so it’s important to do a permanent redirect (301) to a similar or corresponding area of your website.

For example if you sell widgets, and a particular model of blue widgets is no longer carried, don’t just delete the page, but instead created 301 redirect pointing back to your blue widget category. This retains the value of any inbound links you may have obtained for that product, and prevents pages from showing up in the searc hindex that no longer exist.

14. Avoid 404 errors –
This item is more theoretical than fact, but nowadays, (especially with Google), “trust and credibility” weigh heavily in your ranking factors. Therefore, it’s my belief that the search engines do not look favorably upon sites with continual 404 errors.

If you are constantly changing your website, and visitors or spiders are coming up with 404 errors on a regular basis, then it’s possible (and I believe, likely) that the search engines could see that as “somewhat flaky” and lower your ranking. Again I have no proof here, but to me it’s logical, and I’ve always insisted that 404 errors be taken care of when evaluating a website.

There are tools you can use to find broken links, which are the most common source of 404 errors, and my preferred tool of choice is called Xenu Link Sleuth. You can also look at your own internal stats program to see what 404 errors may be getting generated, and while Google analytics does NOT show you your 404 errors, (how stupid is that?) most likely, your own web hosting internal web statistics do.

It’s important to track down and eliminate your 404 errors by either fixing the broken link, replacing the missing file(s), or by adding a 301 redirect for the missing URL to another relevant area of your site.

15. DocType statement in .html code -
Some people may think this is silly, but I’ve seen it help before. At the very top of your code, I recommend placing a DOCTYPE statement in the HTML code. A DOCTYPE statement in an HTML document declares the document type and level of HTML syntax. While no human visitor will ever see this, the statement is read by Web browsers, software, and even search engine spiders.

Again, this may be more theory than fact, but I can tell you that in my experience, with all other things being equal, a webpage with this statement will outrank a page without it more often than not.

If you care to learn more about the technical aspects of this DOCTYPE statement, read this, but otherwise feel free to “view source” here on my site and see what one looks like.

16. Valid .html code -
Requiring valid HTML code in my opinion is way overrated as a search ranking factor, but it is still worth looking at to catch the biggest errors.

If you really want to drive yourself crazy, and ensure hours and hours of work for your Web developer, then you insist that all of your code is “valid” when run through a validator such as the W3C validator tool.

It has been my experience that minor errors showing up here will not affect your ranking, however, I do believe that it is still a good idea to run your site through this validator, so that you can pick up any glaring or dramatic errors.

Most web developers, when shown the list of errors that will undoubtedly appear, will be able to cherry pick their way through them and fix a large quantity. Sometimes these errors can be major, and fixing them can be done easily, and doing so can improve your search rankings.

Other times these errors can be minor, take hours and hours to track down, and in the end they’ll have no significant impact on your search rankings.

My recommendation is to verify that major errors get cleaned up, and simply ignore the rest, unless your goal is just to keep a web developer busy digging through the code.

17. Clean URL’s –
Try to stay away from using long URL strings that contain ugly characters, and make no sense to humans. While the search engines have gotten far better at spidering and indexing them, people are still wary of clicking on them.

Whenever possible, try to use relevant keywords in your page names and directory names, and separate them by dashes, rather than the underscore character.

There is some evidence that doing so can improve your ranking for individual phrases, but there’s even more evidence showing that you are far more likely to get a click through when someone can tell that the URL is relevant to their search. Furthermore, as people share URLs via emails and bookmarks, “people friendly” URL’s are again, far more likely to get the click.

To illustrate, let me ask you which you of the following two URLs are you more likely to click on, if someone sends you a link, or you see them in a search result?

http://www.domain.com/1743233_uld.asp/cid=7344/?item=4330

or

http://www.domain.com/perfect-shirt-red/

18. Avoid Session ID’s –
While this is related to the previous item, clean URLs, it’s worth mentioning on its own. If you have a website that sells something, it’s likely that your users may be assigned session IDs when they visit for tracking purposes.

A session ID is appended to the URL, and makes a new or temporary set of URLs for the users entire visit. This can be excellent for monitoring site visitor statistics and user behavior, but can be detrimental to your search rankings, if your system is assigning session IDs to the search engine crawlers as well.

You need to ensure that session ID’s are not being assigned to search engine robots that are visiting your website, and to stop it, have your developer read this

19. Site Structure –
Your site should have a logical structure, with individual sections or categories for specific types of information and products. Doing so will allow users to easily determine where they are at any given time, it allows the search engine spiders to see a well-organized site, and it also allows you to develop your site in a “theme based” manner when it comes to adding content and developing inbound links.

A quick example would be that if your website sells cars, you have your top-level pages, including home, about us, contact, new cars, and used cars.

Underneath your new cars and used cars categories, you can break it down into brands, years and models, and as you get to specific cars, you would have photos, spec sheets etc about each given car.

Different search marketers call this type of structure something different, but setting things up this way creates a nice “Pyramid” or “Theme” or “Silo” structure to your website that lends itself to excellent search rankings.

Using a graphic tool for charting your websites structure is an excellent way to visualize what your site structure looks like, and for that I use Mindomo

20. Page file size-
Just like your actual web visitors, the search engines like pages that load quickly, and don’t make them wait for files & graphics to download. Keep your entire page size as small as possible, and I prefer to see most be under 100k total. The faster they load, the better.

Web developers and graphic artists frequently want to impress visitors and clients with their graphics or their flash files, but great care should be taken to make sure that a balance is achieved between how a page looks, and how long it takes to load.

You have to remember that pages are over 150K are often not even fully cached by the search engines, and Google considers page loading time so important that it has now become a factor for Googles Ad Words quality score.

They know that user response to slow loading pages produces a negative experience, so they are actually making you pay more for the slow loading pages, so it’s logical that this would extent to organic serps, as they try to improve the user experience.

To be continued -
This certainly isn’t everything but it’s a good start, so this article will be continued has been continued, with 10 more advanced SEO tips.

This is an overview of a rural Oregon realtor website, but needs many, if not all, of the basic fundamentals of SEO101. When you’re trying to build links for a real estate site you have to give people a reason to link to you, by providing valuable information that their own visitors will appreciate.

This website is basically a Portland, Oregon business directory, but many of the individual pages are not being found in the search engines.

This applies not only to queries for phrases, but for specific URLs to0, which indicates a potential structural problem. This video points out some possibilities why, and also covers some fundamental search marketing issues.

The morning started out great with a buffet breakfast of rosemary potatoes, scrambled eggs, chicken apple sausage, thick sliced bacon, and an assortment of bagels and breakfast breads. I’m typically not a breakfast eater but I’ll never turn down something like this, and I piled my plate high and when into our private dining room.

Taking my place at the table between a poker affiliate from Ohio, and a local San Francisco search marketer, I was surprised to find that four of the eight people at my table had been here before at Elite Retreat.

Overall, I would say that the general search knowledge of people at my table was far higher than the average conference lunch table I’d sat at before, and by the end of the meal and was totally impressed with what I learned, and completely stuffed, which for me is always a good combination.

As we made our way into the room, and I headed for the usual front row / aisle spot that I try to snag, I was pretty disappointed to find out that they had laid out our name tags alphabetically, so I walked up and down the rows until I found my tag in the middle of the third or fourth row of seats. With only 32 attendees, it wasn’t a bad seat by any means, but I’m a little bit obsessive about sitting on an aisle whenever I can.

Laid out with our name tags was an impressive array of swag, starting with a leather portfolio (padfolio?). Had I not forgotten to bring digital camera on this trip you’d see a nice picture here.

Inside the portfolio was a really nice fat silver and black pen, also engraved with the elite retreat logo. Very heavy and with a spring action tip, it’s definitely a nice writing instrument, that I’ll be sure to lose quickly. Sitting right on top, and waiting for us to sign with our new pen was the nondisclosure agreement.

I sort of assumed the NDA was coming, and it basically just said “no live blogging” and “respect people’s privacy”, and show some common sense.

The next item sitting there was a video Ipod Nano, engraved on the back with “Elite Retreat 2008 – San Francisco”. Even letter, the Ipod was filled with all kinds of audio files, from Shoemoney’s Webmaster radio episodes, to Donald Trump’s, “How to think like a Billionaire”.

Our master of ceremonies, David Klein, started us off by introducing Jeremy as the first speaker. Shoe talked about his own personal history, and it was a really interesting story. He began after he wrote a guide for how to put pics on cell phone, and that turned into an online application that ended up sorting, storing, and sizing photos for putting on your cell phones, and then that ultimately turned into the NextPimp ring-tone business that helped make him famous.

He discussed the ring tone site and development history, talked a bit about AdSense, and then more about some contextual advertising and affiliate stuff, and then about his current project, fighters.com, in an upcoming one that I shouldn’t mention, that has to do with dating, but I think it’s absolutely brilliant.

Shoe is an entertaining speaker, and a smart guy, and the story he told about someone who should have been his partner was a class act, but there weren’t really a lot of details or specifics. Still, I was riveted, and I thought he gave a good talk.

The biggest takeaways for me were to be creative, incentivize users, and to try to think out of the box and far beyond typical traffic generation methods.

For example, with Auction Ads, he offered people 5 bucks to try it, and he went to websites and offered to replace their Adsense income to show his ads instead, trying to gain visibility for the brand. That high visibility is likely what enabled him to sell off Auction Ads less than four months after launch.

Neil Patel was up next and he didn’t disappoint. Due to the NDA, I can’t disclose a lot of what he said, but let me tell you that I do think this guy is brilliant. I’ve seen him speak before, and his rapid fire style is definitely appealing. If you ever get the opportunity to hear him at a session don’t skip that one.

He reinforced a lot of ideas that I had about social media networks, and he also straightened me out on some misconceptions I had. I have nearly a full page of notes, but he kept coming back to the fact that you have to tailor your content and style to each particular community you might be dealing with.

During the Q&A, he asked if anyone had any particular industries they were having trouble getting social with, so he could offer some link-bait suggestions. For each industry mentioned he came back with a really quick answer, with funny and entertaining ideas that I have no doubt will work well on these communities.

He gave some specific examples of successful campaigns, and gave some very clear steps on how to work some of the individual networks, from Digg to Yahoo Answers, and his talk was well worth the cost of admission…

Lunch was great, with an assortment of sandwiches and salads, and everyone ate quickly in order to get back in and hear the next speaker during our “working lunch break”. I sat next to Brian Clark from Copyblogger, who is speaking today. He told me a little bit about his membership site, Teaching sells, but mostly I tried to eavesdrop on his conversations with Aaron Wall and Matt Mullenweg, which was an easy because it was really loud in there.

Next, Matt Mullenweg the fouder of worlds best SEO machine (WordPress) gave an interesting history about how he started, why he started, and some general philosophy about the open source community. WordPress is even bigger than I thought, with 2.8 million users, 15 to 20,000 downloads daily, and over 600 million page views on WordPress.com blogs last month. Absolutely astounding.

His company has 24 people all of whom work from their own home office, so they are truly a virtual company. He discussed his plans for the future including Word press becoming even more of a content management system and some additional new features coming out any time now, but he specifically asked us to keep them quiet for now.

My favorite quote from his session was related to adding certain features into the back end and how difficult it is to keep clean and easy to use, because “everyone wants their 15 pixels of fame”

Andy Liu from Buddy TV was next, and his discussion had to do with raising venture capital. the detailed information on exactly how to do it was phenomenal, with great tips and lots of bullet points to pay attention to.

I have no doubt that the notes I took could come in very handy someday, but it’s just not applicable to what I’m doing these days, and I probably could’ve done without that session. Still, it was amazing information to have presented so concise and I appreciated his tips.

For the last session of the day they ask for URLs to put websites up on the screen and talk about ways of improving conversions and engaging visitors. I learned a little bit, and as various attendees spoke, it was interesting to hear all of their opinions too, and see all of the different businesses they were involved with.

When one of the attendees brought up their website, the guy next to me said “That sounds familiar, I think I pitched him a couple of years ago”. Within just a few seconds, he brought up an e-mail that he’d sent this same guy in 2006, with some specific details and recommendations about how he would improve their site. The funny thing was many of the changes and recommendations still had not been made, and the panelists touched on nearly every one.

The other thing I learned from this site review session, was that the SEM Hot Seat events that we put on here in Portland are truly world-class.

Immediately following the close of sessions at 5pm, they opened up the hospitality suite where they were offering free snacks and alcohol for the next 3 1/2 hours before the limousines were scheduled to arrive to take us to dinner.

As appealing as the thought of shmoozing and drinking was, I had made a point of not answering any of my e-mails all day and had a few things I needed to attend to. I walked the two short blocks back to my hotel and proceeded to plow through all of my necessary responses while my battery drained away.

When I went to my backpack to get my power cord for my laptop, I discovered that I had apparently forgotten it in the conference room. Panic set in, because my battery was already dead and being in early-morning riser, I find myself with nothing to do and very far behind if I didn’t find some juice, so I walked back to the conference hotel.

Of course when I got up to the room my power adapter was nowhere to be found, even though I knew exactly where I had left it after unplugging it from the power strip. Remembering that there was a computer store across the street, I went over there and was able to buy a $60 universal adapter to get some power.

I went back to my room, changed for dinner, and walked back over to the cocktail party to network with the other attendees.

Two big Hummer limousines arrived to take all 40 of us to a great restaurant, we had our choice of Chilean sea bass, or filet mignon. It was a nice restaurant with impeccable service, and the obligatory tiny portions in the center of the plate. I love gourmet food as much as the next guy, but why do the portions have to be so friggin’ small?

At dinner I sat next to Aaron Wall and his new wife Giovanna, who has an amazing knowledge of the industry. Just like the rest of us here, she has a true passion for what she does, and is incredibly knowledgeable. I’m sure she’s involved in all kinds of projects with Aaron, and besides the romantic aspect, marrying her seems to have been a wise business decision

Aaron’s presentation is this morning, and he said he still had to put a lot of finishing touches on his PowerPoint so he wanted to go work on it after dinner. However, he says he hates working without a mouse and had forgotten to bring one, so the three of us walked to my hotel and I loaned him mine for the night.

So far the Elite Retreat has been great, but as I suspected, the true value in attending has been networking with new people and forging relationships that could go on for years.

Elite Retreat Day 0
Elite retreat Day 2