5 Simple guidelines that will help your on page SEO.  With the recent Penguin update these factors have only become more important than before.  Everybody knows not to use use duplicate content.  Duplicate content includes the Page Title and Meta Description, not just the text on the page.  There are many free tools available online to help check these factors very quickly.  With Joomla websites we use some of these tools as well as Joomla components that allow you to change your titles and meta tags on the front end.   The following recommendations fall within Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

1) Is every page URL in your site search engine friendly ?

Good Example : http://www.destinyg.com/web/website-packages
Bad Example : http://www.destinyg.com/index.php?option=com_content&;view=article&id=89&Itemid=509

2) META Title Tag - Should be Unique and Relevant to the page and limited to 70 Characters.  Anything over 150 characters may be truncated and not appear in a search engine result.

3) META Description Tag - Should be Unique and Relevant to the page and limited to 150 Characters.  Anything over 150 characters may be truncated and not appear in a search engine result.  90% of the time this “Description” is what will be displayed when your website is found in a search.  This is your “marketing message” for that invidual page!

4) META Keywords - Should be Focused / Relevant to the page AND limited to 10 keyword phrases - anything over 10 may be ignored by search engines and considered keyword stuffing.

5) Internal/External Links - Should be less than 100 per page.  Excessive links on any given page may lower the page “score” for ranking.  See the Penguin Update blog for an explanation.

Google admitted today that search spam has increased in recent months, and the search giant has outlined its plan to combat spam and the rise of “content farms.”

Google search quality and SEO czar Matt Cutts published a detailed piece on the Google Blog regarding the company’s efforts to improve the quality of its search results. He starts off admitting what we’ve been suspecting for months: there are more spammers trying to scam unsuspecting Googlers.

“Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English,” Cutts said. “However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.”

Cutts makes it clear that webspam refers to the junk that appears in search results when websites try to cheat their way to a higher position. With the launch of the new version of its search engine, Google Caffeine, Google has been indexing more content than before, including spam.

“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well,” Cutts explained. “To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.”

read more at: http://mashable.com/2011/01/21/google-combat-search-spam/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Mashable+(Mashable)