In fact, roughly 50% of my SEO related work has been un-doing what some other SEO "expert" did. Nothing ruins a web based project like getting penalties or banned from Google. And Google has a fleet of some pretty smart folks whose sole reason for being is finding attempts to artificially influence their search results and then penalizing or banning the offending sites.
I only do "on-site" SEO work because I think I'd rather wash dishes or dig ditches for a living than link build, never the less, link building is a crucial step, but wasted if the on-site elements squander it away. So before
you start with off-site SEO, probably best to work on the on-site stuff first.
Of course you'll want to ensure your pages display correctly, are readable, informative or at least entertaining. That they use valid HTML, CSS etc. After all what's the point in getting people to your pages if they don't look right. Instead, I'll try to focus on the things you just might not think of.
So, here we go. Ask yourself these questions ...
- Do all your pages have unique title, meta keyword and meta description tags?
Likely your site has more than one page and while you'll probably want your site name in the title, I'd suggest that each page have something unique in the title as well as the meta tags.
- Navigating your site, do you ever reach "dead-ends" AKA orphaned pages ?
Just like people, search engine spiders like Googlebot need to be able to get from one page to another, so ensure every page includes at least a link back to your home page. Creating a HTML site map page and including a link to it on every page is also a good idea.
- Viewing the source of your pages, do you have to scroll down through dozens of lines of javascript and inline styling to get to the legible content?
With all the nifty pointy clicky WYSIWYG web editors out there it is far too easy to create a page where the actual content is so far down in the HTML code that search engines don't give it the value it deserves. Using external stylesheets, and combining multiple javascript snippets into one or two external files will certainly help. Basically you want your textual content to appear as close to the opening BODY tag as possible. Using CSS positioning, you could create a div right after the opening body tag filled with your unique and quality content, and positioned to display after your site header, navigation and other non-unique page elements.
- Are your keywords "sprinkled" about ?
I know I've harped about this one before, but keyword over stuffing is likely the biggest cause of site's being penalized by Google that I've encountered. There is no magic number, but there certainly is a limit to how often your keywords should appear. If you just focus on writing informative content, sprinkling your keywords so that the text reads as if you are speaking to your visitors, you should do well in avoiding over stuffing penalties. Still, it doesn't hurt to check your keyword density, and that of your competitors to ensure you are in the ball park.
- Is relevant content to your site's topic actually text?
Try this little test. Open your website in a browser, use the edit menu to "select all", then "copy". Now open a text editor like notepad and paste your content in. Reading this as if you've never read it before, is it clear what the site is about? Are your keywords near the top of the page? If much of your site's content is conveyed with images, javascript and Flash widgets which aren't seen by search engine spiders, you are shooting yourself in the foot. This test is actually the first thing I do when looking to improve site's search engine performance. It is also how I usually discover sites using the decade old black hat technique called text cloaking, like white text on a white background. This is just plain bad. Google and likely most other search engines will see it for what it is, and if you are lucky, ignore it. Not so lucky? Banned.. next?
- Are you honest?
Ok, I admit, that's a loaded question. What I mean is do you have overly self important elements in your pages? Like the Revisit meta tag, meta name="Revisit-After" content="1 Days" or perhaps in an XML sitemap with "changefreq" set to "daily" Do you actually update your site every day? Another common blunder in sitemap.xml files is having every URL with "priority" set to "1.0"
Simply put, not all pages are created equally. Be honest and realistic. Incidentally, the Revisit-After meta tag is completely ignored by Google, but may be used by other search engines, so a realistic value there certainly won't hurt.
Some of the points above I touched on long ago here and here which might be worth reading.. maybe if you are so inclined.
There are also of course off site blunders which are either a waste of time & resources, or potentially damaging to your site, but I've rambled long enough. I'll try to point some of those out next time.
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