It can be difficult to be an expert in SEO because the rules are updated frequently. And the rule book isn’t always made public immediately - in part to test the new rules and in part to measure exploitation by the SEO experts. With the current SEO atmosphere - essentially Google - here art the best 12 Tips for you to remember for the near future.

1) Make sure that you repeat keywords in your page content. webmasters can publish their pages in hopes that they will rank well for competitive keywords within their topic or niche, but without keywords in the texts, body and title, it is not going to happen.

2) Frames are not good. The debate as to whether frames are absolutely terrible for SEO or whether they just are not the best choice. You really don’t want to use frames. Spiders can have trouble getting to your content and indexing the individual pages.

3) Update or create your robots.txt and sitemap files. These files are supported by major search engines and are very useful tools for ensuring that spiders index your site content while avoiding those sections or files that you believe are not important. Sometimes you may see the proper use of these files making a real difference with total crawl failures and a complete indexing of the content pages - this makes them very important to SEO.

4) Check Out Your Googlebot activity reports. These reports tell you how much time it takes Googlebot to get into your pages. If it takes search engine crawlers a long time to index your pages they may take time out and then quit. If the crawlers can’t pull up your pages quickly then visitors are probably getting the same problem too.

5) Check out what your site looks like to browsers without image and JavaScript support. This is a good way to determine how your page looks to a search engine spider. Just disable your image and JavaScript support. The Firefox browser has a plug-in called “Web Developer Toolbar” which makes this functionality. If you can’t make sense of your page with these disabled it means your site is not well optimized for SEO.

6) Make sure your navigation is in HTML, not images. A frequent problem in web designs is the use of images for website navigation. Some companies are not so concerned with SEO but for most companies well optimized pages are necessary.

7) Make sure that all images include the ALT text. This is another very good way to optimize your pages. Search spiders see only your ALT text.

8) Flash must be shown only as needed. From the viewpoint of SEO Flash files are meaningless. Search engines are not able to index text that is in the Flash file. Flash can certainly do a lot for presentation, but use it only for less important content.

9) Each page should have its own < title > and meta description tag. Optimize < title > tags - very important. Webmasters may not understand that when they use duplicate < title > tags for multiple pages it neutralizes targeted search traffic. Run a search on one of your competitive keywords at Google. When you click the first few links you will see what text appears in the title bar. This is a crucial place to include keywords for your pages.

10) Important page elements should be in HTML. Spiders are basically looking for your source code - not Flash, images or other media. Use clean, standards compliant, fully optimized HTML source code.

11) Make sure that your server returns a 404 error code for any unfound pages. Broken links pointing to these pages must be avoided. Don’t create a custom error page to replace this page - crawlers can waste time looking at broken links. The 404 error page is well recognized and spiders know to stop following any link that generates this page.

12) Do not spiders walk into infinite loops. Webmasters use scripting languages, such as PERL, PHP and ASP to add interactive functionality to their web pages, but unless they use robots.txt files or use other preventive measures the search engine crawlers may go into what are called “infinite loops”. Spiders recognize “infinite loops” - they just stop indexing pages at any site flagged for this error.

Also you can read these other enticing articles.

http://www.webtemplatesblog.com/archives/2007/06/19/

http://www.webtemplatesblog.com/archives/2007/06/18/

http://www.webtemplatesblog.com/archives/2007/05/21/

http://www.webtemplatesblog.com/archives/2007/03/07/

http://www.webtemplatesblog.com/archives/2007/02/08/

Do not be an Internet Litterbug,
Arthur Browning