Activity

Good Karma

Questionable Karma

Bad Karma

Writing

• Professionally written copy
• Short, easy-to-read paragraphs
• Bulleted lists
• Written for humans (your target audience)
• Original content
• Frequently updated (weekly)

• Occasional spelling mistakes and poor grammar
• Use of jargon
• Long paragraphs and run-on sentences
• Use of non-relevant keywords to increase ranking (done for search engines, not humans)
• Syndicated or duplicated content
• Scant text per page
• Using GIF or JPEG images instead of text
• Occasionally updated

• Large, uninterrupted blocks of unedited, poorly written text
• Written for search engines (who cares about people anyway?)
• Over-use and repetition of keywords in copy
• Large lists of keywords, many irrelevant to the site or page
• Never updated

Site structure

• Designed for easy use by humans
• Designed intuitively for navigation
• Void of scripts that confuse or repel crawlers
• Search engines can get entire site without crawling too deep
• Html pages

• Heavy use of Java script
• All Flash (not easily crawled by search engines)

• Designed for search engines, hard for humans to understand

Page titles

• Concise, focused title describing what the page is actually about

• Generic title, not related to keywords

• Title is too long
• Title is missing or has nothing to do with content

Outbound links

• To sites related to your site topic
• To highly ranked sites

• To generic sites
• To low-ranking sites
• To poorly designed or amateur sites

• To unrelated sites or link farms (Google hates these guys)
• To unrelated sites with a different audience than yours
• To illegal or adult type content sites

Your domains

• Cherished
• Part of your branding
• Seen as an asset
• Easy to remember
• Unique

• Generic
• Name is an afterthought
• Very long or too short to be relevant to search engines

• Seen as disposable
• Misleading name

Submitting your site

• Manual submission to all major search engines
• Careful thought about submission to directories to protect your brand karma (wording, spelling etc.
• Reasonable submission frequency (every few weeks) that is consistent

• Minimal, manual submission to the handful of top search engines
• Automated submission to several minor or lower-ranked directories
• Infrequent or inconsistent submission

• Fully automated third-party submission (along with another 300 of their clients)
• High frequency submission of site; more than twice a month (how do you like me now?)

Blogs

• Well-written, relevant content
• Use of RSS feed, which allows others to easily pull your content to their site
• Automatically notify blog search engines when you add an entry
• Close monitoring to ensure that posters don't fill your directory with spam or off-topic comments
• Updated regularly
• Exchange of links with relevant, good-karma blogs

• Generic content
• Cut and paste or recycling of tired, old content
• Un-moderated posting from visitors
• No RSS feed!

• Content that is irrelevant to readers and designed only for search engines
• Loaded with spam postings
• poar spellin and grammur
• Site stuffed with repetitive content and overused keywords
• Exchange of links with irrelevant or bad-karma blogs

In-bound links

• Relevant, high ranking, good karma sites

• Non-related sites

• Link farms
• “Doorway” pages built solely for search engines
• Cloned sites
• Bad-karma sites

Success focus

• Long-term focus

• No real focus (it's just a site)

• Short term focus

Legal?

• Original content
• All claims are legitimate
• Proper disclosures
• Promises to affiliates and customers met

• Content and design concepts poached from other sites
• Use of competitors’ meta tags
• Mention of competitors in the hope of stealing traffic

• Stolen content (cut and paste)
• Stolen graphics
• Unsubstantiated claims