Significantly helps search rankings
Links on other websites to freeallegiance.org
Not sure how well we are doing with this, haven't looked it up. Ideally links should contain keywords and not just display as "
http://www.freeallegiance.org". Google places a ton of weight in external links because many other factors are easy to abuse. SEO optimized titles
Fail: Homepage is currently titled "FreeAllegiance - Home Page" Amount of content and keyword distribution
Fail: homepage is only a single page. Googlebot and any other search engine crawlers are blocked from the forums. Nothing in the /forums/ subdirectory is indexed by Google. It also looks like most of our Wiki is not being indexed by Google. Also another big problem is important search terms do not show up frequently or at all on the homepage.URLs including domain, directory names, and filenames.
Poor: Domain is fine. Could be better and a .com, but too late to change now. We only have a homepage so directory/filenames aren't even a factor now other than our wiki which is hardly being picked up by Google. Our Wiki's URLs are very ugly too. "FAW" is meaningless, would be better to rename directory to wiki. Index.php shows before each page name which is bad. Index is not a keyword and has no SEO value to us. Page titles do at least show at the end of the URL but they are not SEO optimized.
Some of the less powerful, but still very useful things to improve rankings
Header tags containing keywords -
Fail: homepage uses no header tags at all.Page freshness -
Fail: homepage is static and blog/forums are not being indexed at all.Alt text for images -
OK Could be improved but most images on the homepage have alt tags
Significantly hurts search rankings
Duplicate Content -
Fail: alleg.netKeyword Stuffing -
OKNew domains -
OK: It is hard to rank well with a new domain. We have been here awhile so our established domain is actually helping our ranking.
Generally thought as not affecting or having very little impact on search ranking, but it is also extremely important that our webpages have meta description tags. This helps Google know what description to show when the webpage shows in search results.
