SEO tips and tricks

[CygnusX]

Anyone have any stories of success or failure from any particular SEO tricks?  I consider the following standard practice:

Use of H1 tags - should be done once per page and contain the keywords you're targeting
keywords - keep lowercase, contain all keywords, and have no more than 4-6 groups of words, separated by commas.  Also, should be unique for each page.  Each keyword should appear on the page the keyword meta is on.
description - should be unique for each page and contain keywords
title - most important keyword first, followed by any other text you see fit
keyword density - try to keep this around 1-2% per page if possible.
backlinks - perhaps the most important.  The more, the better?  Though I don't have any feel for how much link juice (positive or negative) you can get per site.
Double and Triple keywords - can be important for getting rank on specific phrases (ie, 'its my site')
Content updates - if you can have 1 update (ie, added content) each time google crawls your site (which may not be possible), its considered a good thing.  The more updates, the better... which is why blogs do so well.
Site Age - the older, the better
backlinks to backlinks - having a link to a site that links you may cancel out the value of the link in.

Any other tips, tricks?  Designing around these concepts may make a huge difference in the initial launch of your website.

[Chris]

I think this is SEO from 10 years ago, I doubt it works nowadays...
For example, I see no reason for google to value H1. I mean, everyone knows that H1 is used only by sites that do seo optimization. So, if I were google programmer I would make an algorithm to disregard or even slightly punish H1 since it marks an optimized site. Also nowadays hardware is sufficient to crawl the page realtime, META tag is not used except for really the most pathetic search engines.

I believe the proper mindset is, what will benefit google? When user finds the site they wanted to find this will benefit the google. Out task as seo optimizers is just helping a bit the google crawler to clasify our website. Outsmarting google is pointless and not needed. Our site and google are not enemies, we are allies. They want our site to be found by people that search for things that are on our site. We want to help google classify our website properly so it will be displayed highly for people who are really interested in our site. In fact we have the same goal.

We are enemies with google only when we try to do overoptimization in order to take the traffic from segments that are not especially interested in our site. That's when we start doing tricks. That's when google want to track us and punish us.

It is not our job to make the site high on google list, not at all. Out job is to make a site that will be valuable to visitor. Once we do this google will do *everything* so our site appear high on the list, they will do what they can so all these low value hiper optimized pages appear lower, absolutely everything, it is their main priority, actually they care for this much more we do. Of course the world is not perfect and we have to help google a bit in determining what our site is about. But that's basicly it.

[CygnusX]

H1 is still an important feature.  See google's guide below.  The proper use of H1 is still recommended.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Being on a search engines front page for a specific search term could be the difference in getting 5000 vs. 500,000 users to your site.  There is no shame in trying to get on the front page.  The catch 22 is that Google's scheme relies heavily on your site going viral (getting many back links, etc) to rank you at the top.  By this point, its almost too late.  And its far easier to create a good site than it is to go viral.  

So what do you do?  Its not good business to sit back and just hope things happen for you.  And nobody will find you on the back page of the index.  So, you have to take action.  You have to start out by getting the word out on your own.  Posting in forums, emailing friends, submiting your link to Digg, anything that can give you exposure.  If your site sucks at this point, it will fail.  But, if you have content, and if your site is properly designed, Google may push you to the top.  

I realize quality content is the first step.  But it is not the only step.  I think Google wants you to self promote and try to get its attention to an extent.  It wants you to do that so it can judge you by how others respond.  Do you get reported, or do people forward the link?

Every little bit helps.  And getting to the front page helps a ton.

[aerosuidae]

I guess we're talking more about our public sites here, and not inside games. I'm no SEO expert (shudder), but I always thought having clean URLs was supposed to be beneficial too?

I try to replace:

http://example.com/index.php?action=posts&from=awesomeguy42&contains=cooldude

with:

http://example.com/posts/awesomeguy42/cooldude/

.. or if / screws up relative links, then commas or dashes or something:

http://example.com/posts,awesomeguy42,cooldude

Whether it really helps, I don't know. That Google PDf was very light on the subject. It does make the site look nice and neat though