SEO Tycoon

**appraisal57** · 11-02-2006, 03:03 PM

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ultimate-seo-checklist

**vangogh** · 11-02-2006, 09:22 PM

I disagree about avoiding dynamic urls. You should limit the number of the parameter and it's best not to use a parameter called ID, but there's nothing wrong with dynamic urls in general. Search engines can and will read them fine.

Other than that the article looks like it has some good advice. Nice find.

**gringo** · 11-03-2006, 12:43 PM

I believe google have been indexing url's with &id in them for a while but they made it official here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...78747346714704

Not sure about the article, some of the 'theories' are presented as fact surprise, surprise:
- "The closer that you can locate your keyphrase-loaded <h1> element content to the opening <body> element tag, the better". Plausible, but how do they know that's the way it works?
- "Use your focused keyphrases within link URLs and corresponding title attributes". Could help the user unless spammed to death, but as far as I know doesn't help seo
- "Generally, search engines tend to give more weight to the text that appears at the top of web pages than to text published further down the page". Not sure about that!
- "Avoid dynamic URLs that contain ?, &, $, =, +, and % characters, cgi-bin, session IDs, or cookies." I agree with Vangogh about this.

Shame that. A 'Sitepoint Article' presumably has the SP stamp of approval on it.

**vangogh** · 11-03-2006, 02:00 PM

True that the article is presented as fact when it's really more opinion. But for the most part I think the advice is decent. I don't think it will hurt you at all.

Of course in the end on-page seo will only do so much. If you're keyphrases are even moderately competitive it's going to be more about links than anything you do on-page. You should still do on-page seo, but realize it may not have the dramatic results you're hoping for.

**ADAM Web Design** · 11-03-2006, 03:01 PM

The biggest problem with that article is that it opens the door up to spammy application of concept (specifically with the alt and title attributes.)

As far as the dynamic URLs goes:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...ng+City+Campus

#2 on my end looks like it has two parameters.

http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/resul...=70&FORM=REDIR

#6 on my end also looks like it has two parameters.

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=...fp-t-501&x=wrt

#8 on my end...two parameters.

Now, before anyone questions the selection of these phrases as "non-competitive", these are actual phrases people found the Green Building Festival website under and not just phrases I pulled out of my ***.

Another key component of this article that's conveniently missing: stats packages are your friend. And they're also the best way to determine whether your SEO is actually working or not. Most people look at the results for a keyphrase or 20 on Google, Yahoo, MSN and say "that's good enough." It's not...people have to find your site, come to your site, and be interested in the concept.

This is an article that could lead to a lot of misinformation down the road.