I have been seeing a lot of people arguing about when certain updates have happened (more to the point page rank). So I decided to share my data with my readers to help clear up any confusion.

The dates have been collected every time Google updates their page rank – data centers tend to go down a week before an update and a backlink update also occurs before a PR update.

I am adding all PageRank updates on this page for future reference, dates currently range from 2007 to 2010 (Last updated April 2010)

Again I apologize for not having time to write more – The list is based on observations I commonly see on a day to day basis. If you notice your website with any of these, either bury your head in the sand or change it immediately to see better search engine rankings!

1. Using the same keyword more than twice in a Title tag – Having the same keyword listed in your heading 3 times or more will in fact reduce the relevance and strength of those keywords. Most important factor is that it’s readable to the user and is an accurate description of your page.

2. High keyword densities – Including your targeted keyword is obviously important but don’t think for one minute putting the keyword in every link on the page and in every paragraph will make your page more relevant – it won’t.

3. Not having a Valid XML Sitemap – Create one and submit it to the webmaster consoles on the major search engines.

4. URL’s not containing any keywords - Yes, I’m still seeing utterly useless URL structures. Just remember to include an accurate description of the page content in the URL.

5. Using <H1> tags more than once on a single page – There should only be one <h1> tag per page.

6. Not giving each page unique Meta data – should be relevant to each page’s content and unique – you will see benefits in doing this – trust me!

7. Using the same anchor text in all links – Unless you have been around for years, just don’t bother using the same anchor texts in your links. Make them as varied as possible, you will see see an increase in your targeted keywords if your site is optimized properly.

8. Putting analytics code at the beginning of your body content – Doing this will slow down the page content load which will effect usability. The amount of time is not large but noticeable to search engines, always put it at the end of the </body> tag.

9. Not using accurate image descriptions - Stuffing keywords in image descriptions will do nothing for you and may even harm your rankings if used excessively.

10. Not having a 301 redirect setup – It’s not hard to do and it will help with your indexing like you wouldn’t believe!

All this week I have been attending Webtrends Marketing Lab training. For those od you that don’t know what webtrends is – it’s an expensive yet very comprehensive analytics package.

I know a lot of my readers probably would prefer to have Google Anlytics, which is still a very powerfull tool (and free) but webtrends is a massive program which is very customisable. With many clients it proves a more fitting solution.

Until now I hadn’t really considered there might be negative implications of adding tags to pages – well there is, so be careful.

Webtrends allows you to to add perameters to pages enabling something called “Smartview” which is essentially a site overview. However you can display paths, actions, conversions and all kinds of other data. This is achieved by adding the WT.svi parameter – when you do this you are creating a duplicate page – which obviously can have a negative impact on search results.

Something to bare in mind when setting up any analtics software!