NavyCS

I have put some common items together which seem to apply to most sites asking for a review. Follow this basic list and don't hesitate to ask questions!

Are you able to open your site in various browsers such as Fire Fox and Internet Explorer?

If you are running Apache on your server check to make sure you have resolved your domain issue - SEs view both the http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com as separate sites - the biggest problem I see is because of this links to your site may be divided - Yahoo is a good place to see the difference, use the linkdomain: command for both versions and you will more than likely see different results. Consolidate those incoming links by adding the following to your htaccess - this does not work for Windows servers as they have a different set-up and I am no Windows expert. (Hopefully someone will add the Windows information in a reply to this tread.)

If you choose to have the non-www version as "the" domain then modify the RewriteCond and Rule. Remember to insert your own domain!


Search engines will prioritize which index page is the most relevant/important - considering they view the non-www and www versions as separate the same holds true for the domain.com, domain.com/ and domain.com/index.htm. Note: If you currently have the index page in the SEs index and you choose this option it has been my experience that the domain.com/index.html will be re-cached as domain.com/ - I personally experience no change in SERPS. I recommend this addition because of the rare occurrence which was acknowledged by Matt Cutts that each of the index pages I describe "may" produce duplicate results. For MSN I have noticed prior to the addition of the code that they had a cached copy of my domain.com/ and domain.com/index.html - obviously the same page, any penalties I may have been experiencing (my MSN traffic was low to say the least) seems to have been resolved as I am now receiving traffic from MSN.

If your index is php or other extension then modify the "html"

Do your keyword research, do your keyword research, I can repeat that 100 times and still may not express to you how important this step is. It makes no sense to develop a web site based on words and phrases nobody searches for. There are many tools available to accomplish this most important task. Once you have completed your research then write content. I suggest your page title be that of the most searched for keyphrase for the landing page your developing - do not repeat the same title on a different page, all pages should be unique. While writing the content of the landing page make sure you use headings (h tags) for the specific content within the page, they should also be words/phrases which people use in their search.
Only one h1 tag per page - your h1 tag should not be the same as your title.

The h tag flow should be like this;
One h1
No limit on the rest but make sure you build it for the customer.
h2 is a secondary header and is subordinate and relevant to the h1
h3 is a sub header of the leading h2 and so on. so,
<h1 Condos
<h2 Maryland Condos
<h3 Waterfront condos
<h4 condo financing
<h2 DC condos
<h3 three bedroom condos
<h4 furnished with a view
<h3 four bedroom condos

When link building to this page (internally and externally) you should use the various headings and your title as the anchor text when possible. Not all sites will allow you to make up your own anchor text and some visitors may just make a link in a forum somewhere - this is the only reason why naming your page domain.com/keyword.html is important - the keyword.html is part of the anchor text when none is identified.

Images look good but images are not content! Avoid placing words you want to optimize for in an image. When you add an image to your site ensure you name the image with a relevant to the image keyword and ensure you place the alt attribute in the image link. More and more people are doing image searches, especially when shopping. If you have an item for sale, name the image as the SE has no way of knowing the image is what it is unless you tell it!

The title attribute (title=""), not to be confused with the title of the page <title>, plays absolutely no roll in SERPS for any of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo or MSN), only use it to enhance your visitors stay.

That is all for this post, hope this helps!

__________________
Memphis Website Design
Military Benefits