SEOmoz | The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

Update: September 22nd, 2008 - 1:53 PM - Revision 09] I have updated the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet(PDF) to include suggestions from comments. This new version hasadditional information and clears up some ambiguity. Thank you toeveryone in the comments who helped make this better!

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When I first started at SEOmoz about 9 months ago, I was the webdevelopment intern. My experience prior to the internship was limitedentirely to writing code. Since then, I have spent literally hundredsof hours expanding my knowledge into different areas. Specifically, Ihave focused on accepted SEO techniques and small business practices.My beginner SEO checklistsof the last few weeks have been the tangible result of my newlyacquired knowledge. In an effort to return to my roots, I spent themajority of the day compiling what I believe to be the mother of alltechnical SEO cheat sheets. The recommended viewing format of thischeat sheet is as a PDF rather than the traditional blog post (I foundthe blog posts inconvenient to print). Let me know if this new formatworks better for all of you. I also included snippets below so you cansee what is on the cheat sheet before you download it. Enjoy!

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

Overview of front of Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

Important SEO Html Tags

This section includes all the important SEO HTML tags. In addition to listing the tags, it also provides code examples.

Search Engine Indexing Limits

This part includes common indexing limits imposed by search engines on sites that don't hold a lot of authority.

Recommended Title Tag Syntax

This box includes the recommended title tag syntax. Although many great formats exist, this one has proven especially useful to SEOmoz members.

Common Canonical Issues

This covers the most common canonical issues people face and provides an easy solution.

301 Redirect

This section includes the server side code for301 redirects on Apache. 301 redirects on IIS are setup using theprovided GUI and therefore were not included on this cheat sheet.(Plus, I am useless when it comes to configuring IIS web servers.)

Backside

Backside of the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet.

Important Search Engine Robot User-Agents

This portion includes a list of all the spider user-agents of theimportant search engines. The versions on this list will eventually goout of date, but the list will remain useful by helping to identifyoddly named spiders (Ex. IA Archiver = Ask.com).

Common Robot Traps to Avoid

This box includes a list of the most common ways webmasters unintentionally stop spiders from crawling their sites.

Robots Meta Tag Syntax

This section includes documentation for the robots meta tag. Thisincludes all of the available arguments as well as search enginecompatibility.

Robots.txt Syntax

A example of a simple robots.txt. This illustrates how to block specific robots from both entire directories and specific files.

Sitemap Syntax

This section shows the standardized sitemap.xml syntax. It also lists the default places search engines look for sitemaps.