Technical SEO - More than just tags..

I often find it amusing when I hear some one speak of having completed all their necessary SEO tasks by saying that they've "Done their tags". There is apparently some mis-understanding out here as to what SEO may in fact entail.

Here is a brief, certainly not all inclusive list of things you must keep in mind when considering your total SEO presence and strategy:

• Domain name
• Length of time you've owned the domain
• Was the domain owned before you owned it
• What neighborhood is your domain in
• What neighborhoods are the sites linking to your domain in
  
• How many hops from a search engine data center is your hosting provider (little known indexing factor)
  
• The length of time you have your TTL (Time to Live) set for
  
• What type of web server you're using and its URI re-writing capacities
• The type of coding performed on your pages (Clean code, spaghetti code)
• Speed of your page loads - which now implores you to specify height and width attributes to all your images for faster downloads
  
• Type of CMS (if any) and the types of URI strings it produces
• Do you use session IDs
• Etc.

There are generally considered to be over 200 different contributing factors to the ranking and placement in search results of any given web page, the vast majority of which have little or nothing to do with the Meta tags.

So next time your thinking of having some optimization done, remember that you can't just play "tag" and go. You have to get more technical than that.