OK, so I’m not being very original here, however I found some points in one of Matt’s posts that I though would be interesting to bring out in case you missed them. Actually these points come from Vanessa Fox, a guest blogger on Matt’s blog.

Most of these tips are confirmations of what I already suspected, but it is always nice to know when we are on the right track.

First URL formatting, hyphens vs. underscores does it really matter?
In answer, maybe, probably, in most cases Yes. I’ll quote this directly from the blog. “And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores [Ed. Note: bolded by Matt ]. african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.”

Vanessa give the key criteria on when to use dashes or underscores, when you are working with keywords in the URL, is this suppose to be one or two words. Use the proper character to fit your intent.

Another interesting point was with the use of URL parameters. We all know that it is best to keep these to a minimum; Matt injected 1 or 2 at this point. However, these was a caution on using “&id=”. This should only be used for session id’s, that is how Google looks at these and they are not included in the index. Session id’s are ignored by the search engines (or at least Google but probably all of them).

I got caught on this one, although this is not meant as a penalty this may explain why some pages using this parameter do not show up in the SERPs.

One more point that is the first thing I check when I take over the SEO on a new account. Page Titles. These, as well as the description need to describe the page they are on, Not the site. Each page should have a unique page and description tag in the header that applies only to that page. You do not need to add the site name each time unless it is a keyword for that page.

You can find more information on this at Google Webmasters Guidelines as well as on Matt’s blog at Matt Cutts (which you should already have memorized ).