SEO

Overview

Design should adhere to SEO best practices to ensure content can be crawled and indexed
The experience must be built with the user in mind
Avoid any black hat practices such as cloaking, hidden content or any red flags e.g. – showing different content to the user vs the engine
Consider true mobile first designs vs responsive
Key factors to consider: page layout, visual hierarchy, content model alignment with keywords
Keywords should be incorporated into the copy in a natural manner (no keyword stuffing)
Design should complement the content model with enough content that supports the chosen keyword
Image and asset optimization – consider page speed/load

The title tag is critically important, keep it short, enticing and action-oriented:

Titles should be unique.
Readability is most important, but the Keyword(s) or phrase should be as close to front as possible in your title.
Your title tag keyword(s) or phrase should be relevant to the page topic.
Consider writing your title after you write your content.
Understand character limits to avoid truncation, each search engine can have different limits and they change all the time. A title length of about 60 characters is the typical maximum for the Web, (CDC max 70).

A unique sentence or two that has the most important keywords in it.

Provide user with a reason to click!
Use the description to tell users what the content is about. Try to make it a sentence or two. You have about 160 Characters, use them up. Just be aware that different search engines will parse the description information and display it differently according to their algorithm.
Keywords should be as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible, but readability is still important

If the page has an image, add meaningful value to the alt tag and if possible tie to keyword(s) or phrase.

Refers to the H1, H2, H3, etc., tags, help to tell the story of what the content is about.

When you do add headlines and subheads they should include other relevant keyword(s), phrases and / or synonyms

Text that provides a hyperlink to another page and creates a relationship that tells search engines what other pages say your page is about.

Make sure the links are good! i.e. a valid relationship exists, and the link is 'live,' does not 404, etc.
Should be relevant and descriptive.
Vary your anchor text so it doesn’t look ‘manufactured.’ e.g. IP Telephony, VOIP, Voice over IP.
There will be less diversity stemming from brand names, but should still be considered where possible, i.e. “Cisco Nexus 7000”, compared to “Nexus 7000,” etc.
If you are using any of the following; “Click here”, “Learn more”, “Next page”, “at this link”, “here” you are often missing an opportunity to add meaningful anchor text.
Don’t create an anchor text link for every term, and don’t create multiple anchor text links for any given term or synonym

Avoid content complete re-use, i.e., do not copy/paste content

Content that is thin, shallow or lacks substance.

Don’t produce content just to fill a template, or to meet an arbitrary requirement

Illegal characters can hurt your keyword relevance because they can confuse how the user searches for your content

Keyword stuffing to ‘force’ relevance can reduce credibility and page rank