This post is in response to an article I recently read called “55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love.” Overall, I would have to say it is a very well written and informative article with some good points about search engine optimization. However, I have a few comments I would like to add:

Tip #16 says
“If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.”
In reality, you won’t necessarily rank well only because your site has fresh content. A lot of other factors come into play. In order to get high rankings. make sure your content is accurate, useful, and has a lot of backlinks pointing to it!

Tip #20 says
“If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.”
I don’t really think this is true. If so, there would be many sites with virtual hosting accounts that would be unfairly penalized.

Tip #26 says
“Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.”
This isn’t really that true. Search engines are nothing but robots coming to “spider” your site. Humans like quality content, but search engines could care less. You could write endless paragraphs of garbage and still rank in search engines if you have the right keyword density and incoming links. (The only problem with doing this is that nobody will want to link to you, thus making your site worthless)

Tip #30 says
“Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.”
The reason .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines is because they usually have a high PR. They have high PR because they have a lot of natural one-way links from highly respected sites. (Think about all the college resource sites linking to university homepages… Princeton Review, US News, BusinessWeek) In reality, any website be it .com, .edu, or .com.tw would have a high ranking if it had all those high quality links. So, look for high quality, related sites in your niche to get links from and don’t blindly seek .edu links.

And one final note…

Tip #11 Says
“Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.”
I want to emphasize this one because it is so easy to implement, yet so many people overlook it. If you don’t do this, you could suffer duplicate content penalties. Why take the risk?