You can’t remember everything especially with that huge amount of new information we consume daily. It is always great to have a few sheets that list most essential data we often need to deal with (along with SEO tools). Below I am listing a few cool cheat sheets most SEOs will find useful:
SEO Cheat Sheet
The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet (or preview it on Scribd) include:
- Important SEO HTML tags;
- Search engine indexing limits (common indexing limits imposed by search engines on sites that don’t hold a lot of authority);
- Recommended title tag syntax;
- Common canonical issues;
- Important search engine robot user-agents;
- Common robot traps to avoid (how webmasters might unintentionally stop spiders from crawling their sites);
- Robots Meta tag syntax;
- Robots.txt syntax;
- Sitemap syntax.
HTML Cheat Sheets
Html and Xhtml cheat sheets – this page contains a number of must-have PDF documents to quickly remind you of proper tag. All of them are very well designed and contain huge amounts of data on one page. For more basic info on HTML you might also want to bookmark or print this page.
Search Cheat Sheet
Search Engine Operators: this cheat sheet contains all essential advanced search operators for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Besides that, it lists some sample queries to search for backlink opportunities, forums and directories (Note: it hasn’t been updated since 2007, so some data can be outdated, e.g. the hack for supplemental results does not work any more).
Here is also a decent Google advanced search sheet and (on the side note) Gmail shortcuts sheet.
Usability Cheat Sheet:
25 point Website Usability Checklist: keep this list at hand when planning a new website or evaluating an existing one. It lists most traditional usability and accessibility issues and basic recommendations. It is both important and measurable. The list is split into 4 roughly equal sections, (I) Accessibility, (II) Identity, (III) Navigation, and (IV) Content with 3 basic ratings: (1) Green Check = Good/Pass, (2) Red Check = Needs work, but no disaster, (3) Red X = Bad/Fail. Not all points are necessarily applicable to all sites.
WordPress Cheat Sheet
WordPress Cheat Sheet (pdf) (Update:the link doesn’t seem to work any longer, here’s Google cache of the cheat sheet and its copy, please report in the comments if the original link is back) lists some essential php hacks to customize your theme (if you can’t do that with a plugin of course).
Mod_rewrite Cheat Sheet
The mod_rewrite cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet, listing flags for the RewriteRule and RewriteCond directives, list of server variables, a regular expression guide and several examples of common rules.
htaccess Cheat sheet
htaccess cheatsheet lists some very basic but frequently-used htaccess hacks.
Thanks for the link Ann – I’ve been meaning to update our search engine queries cheatsheet, you’ve just given me the motivation ;)
Ahhh I can see that wordpress one helping me a lot, am acually customizing a WP template right now!
Am I the only one who is slightly disappointed to find only one mention of a truly SEO specific cheat sheet in this post?
Nice compilation! Bookmarking this now, for those times my memory goes blank. ;-)
@Johan – as an SEO, I find all of them valuable–even if they’re not all labeled “SEO.” :-)
Was searching for a usability checklist last week, thanks for the link…….
Thanks for these! They will be put to good use!
Ann,
You are making to come often and often to your blog. I have already come across seomoz cheat sheet but this resource makes me easy to instruct my web designers. Again and again I got to say thank you.
Wow great stuff thanks we were looking for some of this stuff to add to our arsenal. Especially since things change so fast and I do get memory blocks or I should admit it it’s old age lol.
Very cool list, thank you very much for sharing it! Definitely bookmarking.
There are a lot of information on cheat sheet but don’t know about this, taken so much for your resource,its going to help me a lot am grateful
Thanks for the mention, Ann. I’ve been trying to get back to basics a bit lately – we spend so much time preaching to the choir as industry professionals that it’s easy to forget that many people still don’t know the core stuff.
Great list of cheat sheets. My desktop just got a little bit less empty.
It is great to see all of this info in one place!Thanks for sharing; I am bookmarking this as well.
Ann, I like to read your articles about SEO. Thank you.
I bookmarked half of the links in this article. Thanks!
Fantastic post – they are really useful especially usability cheat sheet
Really very good information I appreciated. Usability cheat sheet i never seen anywhere in search. Thanks a lot.
Nice Post
Thank you so much. I was searching for that cheat-sheets quite a long time…. Perfect!
Nice compilation, very useful, thanks.
Best delicious link I’ve clicked today! Thanks for putting this list together, the mod_rewrite link is especially good – I can never remember that stuff.
Hey! This is so cool! Congrats!
Great list and very useful. Thank for sharing.
Thanks for taking the time to put this list together, but only one of these is actually SEO. Your title is very misleading. A more appropriate title for this article would be “7 Essential Web Developer Cheat Sheets.”
I’m not trying to be a jerk (so please don’t take offense at my comment), but I’m sure there were lots of people who showed up here looking for SEO tips to improve their sites and instead got WordPress functions and HTML. It’s arguable that all of these things contribute to SEO, but in an indirect way. This list is very useful but like I said, the title is misleading. Please fix it. (:
Nice round-up. Thanks
Thanks, the WordPress one is very handy for me.
Thanks Ann! I especially love the wordpress cheat sheet. It will save me time when I hack at wordpress
Very useful post…
Hi Ann,
Thanks for the post. It really helped me in using mod rewrite and using htaccess and also some others too…
Thanks for the information. Makes things a.lot easier with this info.
My favorite cheat sheet, for all those regexp fans out there…
http://regexlib.com/CheatSheet.aspx
Thanks! Great cheat sheets!
Do you need the mod_rewrite yourself? I have done all the rest and the sheets are very helpful, but always stopped short of this, although it is the most important tool you mention here, I’d say.
Nice post!
Very handy, I bookmarked this one.
Awesome list. Bookmarked.
Wow! Great List. Very useful for me. Bookmarked.
Nice list.
Not really a SEO one, but useful.
Like Juan said, it’s a nice list but not really an SEO one. More like a web developer or blog cheat sheet list.
Regardless, a handy list to have.
All the people saying that the HTML XHTML and others (mod rewrites) are not “SEO” are clearly SEO cowboys, if these are not helpful to the way they perform SEO then what is it that they do?!
Perhaps they are looking for a cheat sheet on how to submit articles to Digg, or directories lol – SEO noobs!
Thanks for listing these so-called essential tips to proper implementation of search engine optimization. This is worth recommending to friends on the look out for free help and tips.
Thanks for sharing these. Hopefully should speed up a lot of my work :)
Thanks for the document, quite useful for us developers :)
ELemental
Some excellent resources. Thanks for gathering these into one easy to locate place. Very helpful.
great article! :)
Thank you for this. It’s wonderful to be able to create one bookmark instead of 7. I think your readers may also want to know that the SEOMoz Developers SEO Cheat Sheet has had a ton of constructive feedback and the author is continuing to evolve the cheat sheet. The link you provided will enable your readers to always be able to download the most up-to-date version of the cheat sheet.
7 Essential SEO Cheat Sheets. such a great job you guys just did.
Thanks for this …. it will really help….
XHTML cheatsheet link has died and gone to Godaddy heaven…
Alternatives?
WordPress cheatsheet link has joined xhtml CS in heaven…
Source update – or permanent kill?
XHTML link seems to work. I’ve update the post with links to the WP cheat sheet, Thank you!
.-= Ann Smarty´s last blog ..SEO FireFox Plugin: Add Many Search Engines to Your Context Menu =-.
Thanks for the cheat sheet! This will be of great use to me.
The WordPress-Help-Sheet is here:
http://www.gosquared.com/images/help_sheets/WordPress-Help-Sheet.pdf
wonderful! maybe not specifically SEO-related, but VERY useful nonetheless – thank you!
You can find more SEO cheatsheets here: http://devcheatsheet.com/tag/seo/
You can find more SEO cheatsheets here: http://devcheatsheet.com/tag/seo/