Basic SEO - Rules for a Natural SEO Campaign

Though Todd of Stuntdubl prefaces his “logical SEO thresholds” with a disclaimer, “It should be noted that this is all sheer speculation from just a few minutes of pondering a subject that often comes to mind,” it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily an incorrect set of assumptions:

• Direct Reciprocal links
  Under 50% of backlinks
• 3-way and neighborhood links
  Under 70%
• Title tags
  Between 3 - 20 words seems about normal
• Heading tags
  3 - 10 words
• Alt tags
  3 - 5 words
• % of “keyword anchor text”
  less than 60%
• % of “natural anchor text” (click here, url, site name)
  greater than 10%
• % of unique anchor text (only occuring once)
  greater than 10%
• Unique linking domains to total backlink ratio
  Logic may dictate the lower the better for G (ROS links are a good indicator of purchased advertising)
• Deeplink ratio
  greater than 10% (but probably higher relative to site or size)
• Unique linking domains on same class C IP address
  Greater than 10(?) may indicate a network (like a web host) and be devalued
• Outbound link text characters to total content characters %
  Greater than 80% of characters as anchor text is probably bad

I wouldn’t agree with any of these as hard-and-fast rules, but it is good to keep these sort of limits and potential triggers in mind when developing an SEO campaign. Of his rules, I would outright disagree with the title and heading tag ones. Some of the others, like deeplinking and C-class links, seem a bit dubious in every instance, as well.