Code
1. Keep your code clean! – This tends to be one of my main headaches when working with affiliates. Because a lot of affiliates don’t always have the best development skills and probably don’t have a team to do it for them these issues crop up over and over again. Messy Javascript and CSS elements coded onto the page are bad for your site, it makes it slow.
2. Page Titles/Header Tags – don’t over optimise these, not everyone has to have a keyword shoved into it, put some in but be clever about it.
3. Meta Data – If in doubt scrap your keywords they won’t help you. In regards to the description this is vital from a CTR prospective, do NOT ram it with keywords, think about what will get people to click through and do that. Use Tom Anthony’s SERP Turkey tool for split testing without putting it live on site. Tip: Using numbers in Meta creates great anchors for the eye.
4. Canonicalisation – Major issue for a lot of people, shouldn’t be any more. Canonicalisation is when two versions of the same website exist on both the www version and the non-www version of a domain.
• http://www.domain.com
• http://domain.com
You can fix this with some basic code in the htaccess file or by using canonical tags.