SEO has been a fairly weak area of mine in the past, so I’ve been trying to brush up on it. Some of the stuff mentioned is really obvious and repeated everywhere (don’t use Flash if you want it indexed; pay attention to keywords…), but there’s a whole industry around SEO. I just came across 55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love, which, although it includes some of the banal advice, is also chock-full of useful advice. Some of what’s mentioned goes against some of what I’d intuited but makes me happy as a netizen to know: “keyword bombing,” for example, often ends up counting against you. Apparently, leaving spammy links in the comments of other sites can do harm, too. A constant supply of fresh content helps to boost relevance, it seems.

The author of that site also posits that links from .edu sites seem to be weighted pretty highly. I wish I was aware of this when I maintained three separate sites in college. Of course, many of the other points seem to suggest that blindly linking to my site for the sole purpose of boosting my ratings might not have actually done much for me. What a lot of the good guides seem to keep coming back to is that, more than anything, having content that people naturally link to is the best thing you can possibly do for SEO.

Edit: An interesting tidbit: Google apparently takes domain name ownership into account, so that a change in domain name ownership appears to wipe out any “trust” that the domain build up. This is pretty interesting to me.

Edit 2: The list got reposted as 106 Quick SEO Tips Even Mom Would Love, and it has some more interesting tips. I’m liking the unconventional wisdom: they mention that linking to other sites, for example, isn’t a bad idea. Conventional wisdom holds that you don’t want to waste “link juice” on other sites. Check out #92, which seems to suggest some creepy levels of knowledge by Google.