SEO basic notes, Onpage | Offpage optimizations, White | Black hat SEO

I this post I plan to share what I have learned by reading a SEO book.

There are onpage and offpage optimizations.

Onpage optimizations include: 

• using your main keywords in <h1> tag, 
• using secondary most important keywords in <h2> tag. 
• Put several of your main keywords to construct the <title> tag usually separated with | sign. 
• Avoid repeating same keywords in the title tag because Google may detect it as spamming and ban your site. 
• Every <image> tag in your site should contain alt attribute with your main keywords plus the word image or picture. It is meant for blind people and to give additional info when the image was not fetched properly. 
• Put your site url and main keywords in a footer of every of your site pages
• Usually it is always better to let Google read first your body text then continue with navigational links if they stand in a left hand sided panel. Put an empty cell or row above your navigational panel so the page parsing could start with the body text
• Use Google Trends or WordTracker or other tool to find best keywords for your website. Avoid using keywords that are used by many websites because the competition will be very fierce and you will achieve nothing. 
• Google does NOT use keyword metatag for calculating your page rank. Check this page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
• Google may use description metatag if it finds it is something useful and show it as a snippet in the search result. Yes you should always try to describe your website within description metatag or your <header> tag.
• You should also bold and or italicize keywords at some place if you think it looks appropriate for the website design. It will help in the search results.
• Avoid using hidden text, because Google can see it and if there is keyword spamming it may ban your site. 
• Avoid image tag spamming, meta tag stuffing, and title tag stuffing with keywords. You will surely get banned. 
• Keep good inner website structure, aka every webpage should be linked to some hub page where we all can easily find it. This is commonly known as a site map. Google checks this and it doesn't like orphan pages.
• If you want to use keywords in your url you should separate them with hyphen, not with underscore. And yes Google, MSN and Yahoo index pages that contain keywords in their url however smaller search engines may or may not use this information to index your page. Check this page: http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/seo-news/keywords-in-url.php

Offpage optimizations include: 

•  Onpage optimization is what you should do, however offpage is what really brings traffic to your website.
• Do NOT use Google, MSN or Yahoo submit pages to submit your site to their index. It is worthless and may give worse results than leaving search engines to index your page by them selves.
• You site may appear in Google's index in 1 or 2 days without effort on your side. 
• You can purchase reciprocial links to your site from link directory sites like http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/
• One site of PR 5 pointing to your site may increase traffic several times in difference with several sites with PR 2 or 3.
• Google and other well known search engines use several criteria to evaluate your website. That include: Which websites point to your site, the number of sites pointing to your site, PR value of sites pointing to our site, page title of websites pointing to your site, anchor text used in the link linking to them, the number and type of links linking to your site, the number of sites linking to sites that link to your site, are these sites deemed as authority sites by Google, the IP address of sites linking to your site (are they all on same IP address).
• You should use "link" keyword in Google to check all sites that contain that url address. Example: type in Google: link: http://www.domainname.com
• Google checks IP address of sites linking to your site and it cannot be tricked by pages pointing to your site that lay on same IP address.
• You can search link directories for link exchange using this technique, type in Google: keyword "Please also suggest my link to the linkpartners.com directory". Replace keyword with your own keyword. I have tried this, it brings some results but not much what I expected. You can contact sites with a submit form for link exchange. 
• Avoid linking to site that doesn link back to your site. You PR value suffers.
• Use SEO Elite to check for sites with PR 0 whether they are banned by Google. If yes, they don't exist in Google's index than you may NOT want to link them anymore, because your site will get penailzed or banned too.
• You should create link hub pages with up to 25 reciprocial links to other sites withing your website. 
• You can calculate your page rank with a formula. Check this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank, this also may come in handy http://checkpagerank.net You can also use some of the GoodKeywords tools to check your page rank, or Google's toolbar.

 There are two types of SEO techniques, White hat SEO and Black hat SEO.

 Black hat SEO is more concentrated on search engines and for short term financial return.That means using agressive techniques like keyword stuffing and spamming, that leads to fast financial return but for sure your site will get banned by search engines sooner or later.

White hat SEO includes using SEO techniques according to search engine guidlines. It means doing all things that will not harm your site's page rank, for a long term results and meant for real people. Wirting human readable articles, onpage/offpage optimisations, without using keyword stuffing or spamming. Maintaining goot site structure, recirprocial links etc...

You may want to recall to this post http://tunephp.blogspot.com/2014/07/search-engine-optimization-made-easy-by.html