Create a Robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is a form of communication between visiting robots (spiders) that index the content of your web site pages. Every search engine has a spider, Google has one and so do Yahoo!, Msn and Ask.  It is a program that visits your website and takes information to be analyzed later by the search engines.  For those spiders that obey the file, it provides a map for what they can, and cannot index. The robots.txt file resides in your root directory, for instance mine is at http://BonsaiJon.com/robots.txt

In this file you can tell the spiders not to index certain files or directories.  Without it spiders will crawl every page found, even those you don’t want including your private login directory, image, css and javascript files etc.  This may expose folders you don’t want to be seen publicly and take unnecessary bandwith.

You can read a tutorial on Optimizing Robots.txt file for SEO.

Hosting

Don’t be cheap,  choose a good hosting provider.  There are hundreds of website who offer unlimited space for $9 and this may be good to start off with and minimize cost, however if you want good rankings and astound reputation get a decent server.   These kind of websites will host hundreds and sometimes thousands of websites on the same server and IP Address.  If there are spam sites, they might get black listed and if Google blacklists the entire server than guess what? You can say bye bye to your chance of ranking or maybe not even getting indexed.

One obvious reason to get a decent hosting is speed.  Your users will not enjoy a slow loading website. If it takes more than 5 seconds to load, they might even bounce.  Google doesn’t like slow websites either and you may be penalized.

Also avoid having your blog or website hosted publicly like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com.  I am not saying the service is bad, however it is NOT YOUR blog. You manage it, but on any given day they can decide to stop the service.

Optimize Your Images

First off let me start by saying that Search Engine Spiders DO NOT see images.  They see only text, however we can also optimize our images for seo.

• Size Does Matter - Make sure that your images are not too large so forget about using images from your camera.  All images should be 200Kb or smaller.  Preferably images should be between 1K and 35K.  Use them according to your needs, if you have a thumbnail for your image, do not use the large image and resize it through html code
• Quantity - Avoid having your site bloated with a lot of images, like with any other tool in your arsenal, use them wisely.  Avoid having images for your menu or your title tags.
• Use Alt and Title Tags- Alt and Title tags say what the image is about, and when an image is used as a link you can consider them as anchor text.

Let me make this clear, Images Do Not have any Seo Value, so it’s useless trying to stuff keywords in your Alt Tag and  Links From Images Do Not pass link juice/authority/Page Rank

Site age

Web sites are like wine, the older they are he idea the better for SEO they get. The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped up and might be spam and soon disappear. There is not much you can do about this except wait and buy your domain for more than 2 years of more.  Again don’t be cheap a domain costs $8, it does you no harm for buying a domain for 3 years, you’ll be protecting your brand.

Be Certain that All Links Are Valid

You will be penalized if your site is not linked properly.  Too many dead links will not look good to your visitors and neither will it to bots, they don’t like wasting time and resources.  If you have Google Webmaster Tools (which you should) you will notice that Google starts complaining if it notices dead links. The larger a website gets, the harder it is to know if there are dead links, especially if you are linking externally.

I like to use Xenu Link Sleuth.  It looks a bit crude but it gets the job done.