Angela Natividad of AdRants published a great article on SEO yesterday. Seeing as we’re in the midst of our site revamping (and, yes, it’s only flash right now, but fret not – the HTML is in the works!), I am going through a minor obsession with this right now.

My five favourite tidbits that she shared are as follows:

(1) AJAX and CMS aren’t so great for spiders.

(2) The time invested in preparing unique metadata, details, titles, and links is actually very much worth your time.

(3) Google likes community – include forums, reviews, etc., wherever possible.

(4) If you change your site – say, updating from HTML to PHP – you should create 301 redirects from each old URL to the new ones. Site maps also effectively triple the speed of this process. Additionally, using 301s ensures that Google understands this is fair duplication of content, and not the kind of abusive duplication that gets you blacklisted.

(5) Offpage factors do matter (and in more than just a linkback context). Description tags are important in influencing how often your listings get clicked. Bounce rate matters (break up your flash if you roll that way), as does lifetime of the URL (keep the oldest ones forever), and absence of clicks when you miraculously do show in a search (keep the content relevant).