SEO is an acronym, which stands for either Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer. A Search Engine Optimizer is someone who performs Search Engine Optimization. For practical purposes, we will use the term SEO to mean Search Engine Optimization in this article.

Put simply, SEO is the practice of “optimizing” a website to be easily found on a search engine. The object of SEO is to bring in more customers or users to a website by gaining a better “position” in the search engine results. A higher position in the search engine increases the likelihood that a site will be viewed by people looking for the services that they offer.

SEO can be the most effective form of marketing that a webmaster has at his or her disposal. An effective SEO strategy will result in increased visibility for the information, products or services that a website offers.

Most forms of SEO are, also, very cost effective. Users who find a website in a search engine’s results are actively searching for what the website has to offer, resulting in a high conversion rate of website viewers to customers. Best of all, for the marketer, SEO brings these customers to the site at a much lower price than conventional advertising; many methods of SEO cost nothing to implement.

Additionally, a high position in the search engine’s results gives the potential customer a sense of security. The website is perceived by the searcher as being closely related to what they are searching for and gives the site owner added credibility. For many users of the internet, the only available method of judging an online company is its inclusion and position in the search engines. This is especially important when dealing with newer internet consumers. A high rank in their search results gives them the perspective that you are stable and that the search engine they use considers you to be credible. It also gives the user the idea that your business is much larger than it may, in fact, be. On the other side of the coin: a business, whose site is not ranked highly in the search engines, is often viewed as less trustworthy or respectable. Whether or not these perceptions are correct or appropriate, a successful SEO strategy will allow you to take advantage of these facts and increase your market share.

As a result of these factors, SEO is one of the most vital aspects of a webmaster’s job. There are few things that an entrepreneur can do that will provide greater returns on the time and money they invest to increase their business.

There are a number of different optimization methods in use today; the best results will be attained by using a combination of several of them. That said, there are also methods that can adversely affect your search engine ranking. To make it even more complicated, each search engine uses different criteria to assign a rank to your site. Because of this, it is necessary for the webmaster to learn as much as possible about how each of the schemes works and how it will, eventually, effect their site.

You may be wondering why so much of the information on Search Engine Optimization is written, almost exclusively, about optimizing a site for Google, rather than one of the many other search engines. There are actually several different reasons for this trend. One of these is, simply, that a high rank in the Google search engine results will give you a considerable increase in traffic to your site. The most important reason, however, is that no other search engine can give you the level of benefit that Google can. And, since each search engine uses different criteria for assigning each page or site a rank, webmasters must pick which search engine they want to optimize their site for.

Nearly 70% of all searches are made using either the Google or Yahoo search engines. Due to agreements between these two search engine giants, the top results on Google will virtually always be the top results on Yahoo. Google is, then, obviously the most important search engine for a webmaster to work with.

Google has the largest database of any search engine. With over 3.3 billion pages listed (and growing daily), it contains more sites than any other. It is partially due to this, almost universal, coverage that the majority of internet users choose to use either the Google search directly, or another site that uses its database for search results.

Additionally, Google’s rules are more stringent than most if its competing search engines, so a site made following its guidelines is likely to be easier to get listed and rated highly on other search site’s databases.

This does not mean that other search engines are not important, but it does mean that a webmaster should start with Google and work from there. If you can do well on Google, your site will make it anywhere.

Page Rank, or PR, is the primary system the Google search engine uses to rate an internet site (or more accurately each page of a website). As such, it is the most important element in achieving a successful SEO on Google. Each page is assigned a PR rating that is used internally by Google to help make decisions in the value of search results and a second number, which is simplified, for public information; the common PR rating system that we see is based on a scale of 0-10. Page Rank is not, as some people believe, the number of the results page that the page is found on when a search is made.

Page Rank is used by the Google search engine to assign a value to a particular page. The higher the value of the PR rating, the more emphasis will be put on the site in Google’s estimation and in the search results. When one page links to another page it is casting a vote for that page. The importance of the page casting the vote determines the importance of the vote. The importance of each vote cast is taken into account when that page is rated. A page with many votes or links is, normally, more important than a page with very few votes or links. Important pages receive a higher rating and appear at the top of the search results. Google does not accept paid placement in the search engine (although it does have paid listings, which are highlighted, above the search results and adwords listings on the right hand side) which means that a web page can not pay to become higher up in the search. A web page must rate high in importance to be at the top of the search engine.

Google re-indexes and updates its database approximately once each month, therefore the PR rating of a site will generally stay the same during the month and then may change dramatically at the end of a period. This is important to realize for several reasons. The first reason is that many webmasters become discouraged when the changes they make to their site do not immediately make a difference in their PR rating; patience is key here, as it will take some time to get the benefits that you are looking for. Secondly, it is necessary to remember that SEO is an ongoing process that must continue, or the benefits that you have gained through your optimization strategy will be lost. It is also important not to make mistakes that could adversely affect your PR rating.

The importance of Page Rank in an SEO can be difficult to overstate, but it is not impossible to do so. Indeed, those who undertake an SEO project and ignore the other rules and concepts inherent in the system will not be successful. Page Rank, for instance, will not give you an advantage if you do not have the proper keywords or keyword usage in your pages to make use of the benefit that a high PR can give.

Google does not give us details about exactly what a particular PR rating actually means in terms of it’s relevance, except that a higher number is better in it’s system and the information that a PR rating of 0 either means that the site is very new, not yet indexed, is considered to be of a very low quality or that the website owner has made a serious mistake that has earned them Bad Rank.

The PR rating of each page may vary drastically from other pages within the site. Many webmasters do not realize that the index page is often one of the lower ranked pages in the site. This is due to the generally lower quality (as seen by Google) of the content on the index page. The index page’s primary purpose in an SEO is to provide links that the Google spider (a bot that scans the internet and searches out information) can use to find the other pages in your site. This is another important element that is often misunderstood; many webmasters think that their SEO project starts and ends with their index page, when the content pages are the most important part of the job.

Additionally, although the overall PR rating will be decided by the links and value of the sites that are linked to and from the site, it is important to build a site that uses proper Keyword and other policies and stays away from potentially problematic methods to build traffic.

Google provides a toolbar, which can be installed into your internet browser, that shows the public PR rating of a page when you are viewing it. You can follow your PR rating by using this free tool.

Now that we have an idea what Page Rank is, it would be helpful to know how it is calculated. Google has chosen not to release a great deal of information on exactly how PR ratings are determined, but they do tell us a few of the factors. There is also evidence of several other methods that can be used to increase your PR rating. The system works primarily through links on various pages, both inbound and outbound, and the values that Google has assigned to each of these links.

A link from one page to another is considered a vote for the page that is linked to. The system is designed to come out with a normal PR of 1. This means that the average site on the net will have a PR of 1. “Better” rated sites will have a higher number.

The original Google Page Rank Formula worked like this:

PR(A)=(1-d)+d(PR(T1)/C(T1)+ … +PR(Tn)/C(Tn)

PR =Page Rank of page A

PR(T1-Tn)= T1 is considered to be the first page and Tn is considered to be the last page that are linked to the page that you are referring to.

… denotes that there are additional pages between T1 and Tn

d is a “dampening factor” This factor is generall set to .85 and is intended, along with the 1 value, to allow for a certain amount of deviation. This element should not worry you as an average webmaster much. Just plug in .85 for the value of d or replace (1-d) with .15 if you are referring to a site with a PR of 1, or 7.15 if you are referring to a site with a PR of 8 (and so on) and go on.

C is the number of outgoing links on the page. Each page “shares” its vote spread out evenly between the sites it chooses to link to. C(T1), for example, is the number of outgoing links on page T1

Google has made a number of modifications to this basic system and does not provide information on exactly what these changes are, because they do not want the system to be manipulated by webmasters or copied by other search engines. For this reason (and the fact that the value of the sites that are linked to you and that you link to may change), it is impossible for someone to use this algorithm to calculate exactly what the value of their PR rating will be. The algorithm can show you, in basic terms, how you can increase your PR rating by increasing the number of sites that link to you and by getting clinks from higher PR rated sites. It also shows how outgoing links can hurt your PR. This is particularly important, because if your page is linked to a site that the search engine has assigned a 0 value to, your PR rating will be adversely affected. Always be very careful about linking to outside sites. There is little to no benefit to your SEO work and the negative aspects can be catastrophic.

Because Google chooses not to tell us exactly how they make their calculations, the easiest way to understand how Page Rank is calculated is by understanding these basic facts:

1. Incoming links are almost always good, but sites with a low PR rating will not help much and certain sites (like FFA sites; see Common SEO Mistakes section on this site) may lower your PR rating.
2. Outgoing links are almost always bad. You need to be careful about who you choose to link to and remember that the “votes” being cast for you by the links from other sites will be split between the sites you link to.
3. Link Exchanges can help or they can hurt you. It is very difficult to calculate exactly what effect they will have. It is known, however, that a high ranked site will be hurt less when using a link exchange than a low ranked one will be.
4. The use of techniques that are not accepted by the Google as proper SEO techniques can get you “Bad Rank” or PR-0 and THIS IS SOMETIMES PERMANENT. This means that your site will automatically be at the last of the results (for instance, page 285,694 of results!)

We have already gone into a great deal of detail on what Page Rank is and how it is calculated, but it is important to note that Link Popularity and Page Rank are two different things. That said, a high Link Popularity can help with Page Rank, providing that the links are of a high quality.

Link Popularity is number and quality of sites that link to your site. This sounds very similar to the definition of Page Rank, excepting that Page Rank is a set rating system, defined by Google. There are many different ways to rate the Link Popularity of a site or page and a site that has a high Link Popularity on one, or even many, of these systems, may still have a low Page Rank rating in Google.

A site, or a page within a site, may have many links to it, but the quality of the sites needs to be taken into consideration. There are many sites that provide links to a large number of other sites and these will have a low PR rating. If they specifically exist to provide links to other sites, they will have a PR rating of 0 (as is the case with FFA, or Free For All Sites; I hate to keep repeating myself, but so many webmasters believe they will get an advantage by using these that it needs restating…. See our Common SEO Mistakes section). Sites like this will HURT your PR rating, not help it. On the other hand, they may (and probably will) increase your Link Popularity rating. Early search engines did not have a way to decipher these pages from higher quality content and, as a result, you could use this technique to gain an advantage. Conversely, the search engines CAN decipher these type of sites now and they will HARM your PR rating. Any site that the search engines feel is using an unfair or unbalanced way to provide a benefit to your site will negatively affect your PR rating.

There are still a few search engines out there that use unweighted Link Popularity as a way to place a value on your site. There is a way to get a benefit from this, without negatively effecting your site. It involves having two copies of your site. One site should be set up and optimized for Google, the other should be virtually identical AND NO LINKS SHOULD EVER EVER EXIST BETWEEN THE TWO. This is important. Every page must be copied and placed into a separate directory on your server. Then, you may use FFA sites and Link Popularity to aid in your SEO plans, if you are submitting to the alternate search engines. The benefits of doing this are relatively light and are not worth the efforts and additional storage needed for most webmasters, but if you feel that you absolutely must use FFA sites and Link Exchanges, then do it on this separated site.

The important thing to note here is that your Link Popularity on various sites is not a good indicator of how successful your SEO project will be. Do not confuse the two terms, even though they may seem similar.

Okay, now to explain why I said that Link Popularity could help Page Rank. The best way to say this is actually: If you have all high quality links, a high Link Popularity rating generally indicates a site that has the potential for a high Page Rank rating.

Okay, now we know what Page Rank is and how it is calculated, but we still need to find out exactly how to make our Page Rank higher. The methods below are only examples and a bit of ingenuity, as long as you don’t break Google’s rules, can make an otherwise average SEO very successful.

1. Get other sites to link to yours. This sounds simple, but can actually be rather complicated to do. You can accomplish this by paying for the links (i.e. advertising), by placing reciprocal links or by doing something outstanding that gets them to provide a link to you.
2. Make sure that the sites that link to yours have a good PR rating and do not involve themselves in banned or questionable practices. This is of paramount importance. One bad site linked to you may not kill your PR, but 5, 10 or 20 will. This means that you, as your site’s webmaster, must continually check any links that you have (both incoming and outgoing!). This is particularly important when using reciprocal links, but is also important when deciding what pages to advertise on.
3. Link all of your various pages together. You are losing nothing by doing this, as the votes carry through. You are also adding votes to each page by each of your pages that links to it. You need to be careful here, however, and make sure that every page had REAL content on it. Conventional “doorway” pages (see Proper Use Of Doorway Pages on this site) can get you that dreaded PR rating of 0 and will not help you in the Google PR ratings.
4. Link your various sites together. This is the best form of a reciprocal link, as YOU are in CONTROL of what goes on with your sites. You know that no one is going to send spam or perform unacceptable SEO techniques which could hurt your PR rank. And, again, these links certainly cannot hurt you.
5. Add additional content pages. The more content pages you have, as long as they are linked together and contain legitimate content, the higher your PR rank will be and the better your SEO project will go.
6. Raise the VALUE of your sites by using proper Keywords and Keyword links.
7. Add a blog and/or a forum to your site. Blogs and Forums both add tons of valuable content pages to your site and the number of linking pages that come from them will help your overall status tremendously. You may find that your index page never quite makes it to the top of the search engine, but your Blog or Forum pages do. Just remember the rules: link back to your pages and only your pages and never ever break the rules (see our section on “Common SEO Mistakes”).
8. Add additional content and update regularly. Stale pages will not rate as highly as pages that have been updated recently. Also, Google will not spider, or crawl, your pages as frequently if you do not make frequent changes and additions. This is another reason that a good blog is so beneficial and why forum responses rank so highly in the search results.
9. Add in definition pages. Add in a separate page with the definition for any term that you feel ANYONE might not know. With links back to your pages, these are great for your overall project.

As you can see, raising your rank can be very inexpensive and effective, but it will take work and time. Again, webmasters must remember that results are never immediate, but “the best things in life are worth waiting for.”

As we talked about before, Page Rank can be the most important aspect of a successful SEO (see What is Page Rank?). All of your other SEO work will benefit from the time and efforts you put into boosting your PR rating. A rise in the PR rating of your pages will mean that each keyword you work with has a higher chance of being successfully brought up higher in the search engine results.

Let’s take an example. Say that you run a site that sells pet products. You have successfully introduced a blog, with news about each new product and various news about the industry as a whole. You have also opened a forum, to allow your customers to ask both you and other customers or visitors questions that pertain to pets. You opened both of these to boost your PR rating, but each piece of news and each forum question also becomes an entirely new page. So, when someone else is looking for the best way to get rid of fleas, they find the answer on one of your news releases or in one of your forum pages in the search engine results and click through to your site. You have, potentially, just gained a new customer.

Another example: You have managed to raise your PR rating. This means that you will be more likely to be found higher in the search engine results. So, instead of being on page 139 (or 139,000), you are in the top one or two pages, which is where you want to be. Just raising your PR rating will help with EVERY Keyword you work with. This means that you are effectively MULTIPLYING your work, without a great deal of extra effort.

Also, customers who use the Google Toolbar will be impressed by the “importance” that Google assigns to your site. This is like getting an endorsement from Google. Your sales percentages go up on your website viewers.

So, you get more viewers for your site and more of those viewers buy. This means two things to you, as a webmaster: More Profits and an even better results later on. This second result is because the more people you have view your site, the more people will return. Also, you will have more members of your forum, who will ask and answer more questions, which means more pages on the search engine the next time your site is spidered, which means higher PR, which means a higher search engine placement (and more search engine placements!) and so on, and so on, and so on.

Keywords are the words, or search terms, that you want to target in your SEO project. Keyword phrases are combinations of more than one word to form a search “phrase.” Keywords is also the name of a Meta Tag. We will explain what these terms mean and give an example of each in this article.

Keywords are what somewhat types into the search engine to find your website and what you, as a webmaster, are trying to capitalize on. Keywords should be pertinent to your products or services and should be clear and concise. Here is an example: Denise needs a new memory chip (or RAM module) for her computer; she enters RAM into the search engine and finds your website, which has targeted the keyword: RAM.

Keyword Phrases are just two or more keywords used to form a (relatively) common phrase. An example is: Allison wants to find a good dog food for her diabetic poodle. She enters the search phrase: diabetic dog food into the search engine. Your company deals in, surprisingly enough, sugarless dog food, and you have performed a competent SEO, utiltizing this phrase…. So, she finds your site.

The Keywords and Keyword phrases Meta Tags are tags used in the head secion of an html document to give information to the search engines. As we have learned in previous articles, these tags are not nearly as important as they once were, but should still be used. Just be sure to follow the rules that we have mentioned when dealing with them.

Keyword Links are links that use keywords or keyword phrases as the visible link in the document. An example is: Instead of using CLICK HERE for more information (with CLICK HERE being the hyperlink), use Just click DOG FOOD for more information about our product (with DOG FOOD being the hyperlink). This makes a big difference in the search engine. Remember here that the search engine is more worried about what is visible to the user than what the actual link is to.

Proper use of Keywords is a must do for any webmaster. See our section, “How To Use Keywords,” for information on how to make them work for you.

Now that we know what Keywords are, it is time to learn just how to use them.

Keywords can make or break your SEO project, so it is important to make certain that you are using them in the most effective manner. Below, I have listed the primary ways that Keywords can be used to increase your website traffic by boosting your search engine results.

1. The first thing that you have to do, when working with Keywords, is decide what keywords you want to target. Too many webmasters think that the most common keywords are the ones that they need to go after. In reality, trying to get your page or site into the first one or two pages of results (which is where you need to be, if you want your site to be seen) with the most common keywords is going to be virtually impossible. There will be thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of other businesses who are targeting these same keywords. Instead, look for less commonly used terms that are related to your site or your product/service. Additionally, generic terms will be just as difficult to compete in; be specific and use keywords that describe EXACTLY what you offer. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t attempt to use the more common phrases as well, but your primary focus should be on the terms that you are likely to have a chance of success with. There are many terms that are used regularly by searchers which are not currently being targeted effectively. Go to the search engine you are targeting and type in various keywords and phrases that are related to your business. If the top results are not particularly specific, then you may have an opportunity. You should really target that term if there are a small total number of relevant results. In Google, see how many Google Adwords results there are; this will give you an idea of how many businesses are interested in the phrase.

2. Next, we will look at the first place that your keyword should be used. This is the title of your page. In the previous articles, we talked about creating pages for each product or service that you offer. By having the title of your page match the keyword or keyword phrase that you are trying to target, you will increase your possibility of being seen in the search engine. Don’t forget that your content pages are more important than your index page. Make a separate page, with real content, for each product or service that you offer and give it a good title that is relevant to what you are offering.

3. Meta Tag KeyWords: Meta Tags are no longer the primary way that a search engine learns what type of content your site has, but you should still include them. Use each keyword that you want to target ONCE and do not include more than 10-15 keywords on each page. NOTE: You can, and should, use different Meta Tag keywords for each page of your site.

4. KeyWord Content. This is the most important use of KeyWords. You should include your KeyWord content in ACTUAL HTML TEXT on your site, especially on the pages that you are wanting to be viewed in the search engine. Don’t worry so much about getting your index or main pages listed with each keyword; work on the pages that deal with the product or service that you are offering. Do not needlessly repeat your keywords, but do use them repeatedly when you are referring to what you are offering. You might note that I have repeatedly used the terms SEO and Page Rank more than I really needed to in some of the previous articles. This is an example of what I am talking about here. Also note, however, that I only used them in full sentence text, with exceptions. Major search engines are amazingly intelligent and can tell when a word is repeatedly used out of context.

5. KeyWord Links: Next to Keyword Content, KeyWord Links are the most important (have you noticed yet how many times I have repeated that term? Going back to KeyWord Content for a moment, think about the search phrase: most important seo and all the words that might be used after it). KeyWord Links are, again, links that have the keywords or keyword phrases used as the visible part of the link. Google and the other search engines will assign this link, and your page, much better results than if it simply said Click Here.

Those are the ways that Keywords are used by SEO professionals to optimize sites within the search engines. Now, you to can very easily make use of these techniques to increase your position in Google and the other search engines.

Meta Tags were once the primary way in which a search engine found out information about your website. Modern search engines, however, do not place as much importance on the use of Meta Tags. This does not mean that you should ignore them, however. Properly used meta tags can still be useful in a successful SEO.

While it is true that Google’s algorithms will not lend much weight to the Meta Tag content, they do help in other search engines and, when properly used, will add a small weight to the content of your site.

The most important rule in using Meta Tags is that you should never overuse a phrase (keyword). Use each keyword or keyword phrase once and once only and include only about 10 or 15 phrases in your Meta Tags for each page.

Use targeted tags for each individual page in your site. This allows each page to have a different description and to target different keywords. Getting the description page for the product or service that you are offering to the top of the search results is your objective and this can be a useful tool.

Doorway pages are an often mis-understood and potentially dangerous tool. They can also be a very valuable tool in an SEO project.

Doorway pages are pages that are designed to rank highly in the search engines, target 1 or a few keywords/keyword phrases and act as a doorway or link to your site and the product it offers. They are sometimes referred to as gateway, bridge or supplemental sites (among other things). There are countless software products and companies offering services to create these pages for you, but there is a catch. Using Conventional Doorway Pages Will Get You Banned From The Search Engines! This is because the search engines view doorway pages as spam-dexing. Spam-dexing is any practice that increases indexing of a site by the search engines illegitimately.

There is a way to make good, useful and acceptable doorway pages. It takes some work though. While improperly used doorway pages can mean a complete failure on the search engines, properly used doorway pages can be the best tool you have at your SEO disposal.

Here are a couple of techniques that will give you great doorway pages. Also, see our section on “How Do You Increase Page Rank?” for more information on why these work so well. Much of the work here goes hand in hand with other methods that we use throughout the SEO process. In fact, some of the methods we have already gone over are actually creating a type of “doorway page.”

1. Create a page for every product and service that you offer. It can be tempting to limit the amount of work that goes into completing your website by having all of your offerings on one page, but this will severely limit the amount of exposure you get. Just remember that if you create the pages in frames, they won’t do you any good! These pages should be legitimate pages with a description of what you are selling (or giving away).

2. Make “definition pages,” with a definition of ANY words that ANYONE who views your site might not understand. Use a KeyWord Link to link the word in your site to the example page. TIP: Make this definition open in a new window, so that aren’t taking customers away from your site, but still include a link (use an HTML sidebar for example) to your other primary pages. Each of these pages will be an additional “doorway” back to your site and will be indexed by the search engines. You are also giving your potential customers additional valuable information. Remember to state on these pages that they are definitions of the term, as that is an additional keyword search phrase as well.

3. Start a blog. A blog can be used here to give out news about your company, the related industry, or even just a new product you are offering. Every page you create in your blog is an additional “gateway.”

4. Open a forum. Give your customers a place to ask questions. Every question creates a new page that will be indexed in the search engines and, best of all, they all lead back to your site. TIP: Give out your information releases in your forum as well as your blog. This doubles the impact. You might even advertise (and create your first blog and forum entries) that you go to the forum daily and answer the questions.

These are all very effective ways to make use of doorway pages in a way that will help, rather than penalize, your site.

Okay, now we have gone over the best ways to successfully run an SEO program. Let’s look at some potential pitfalls.

NOTICE: THIS IS SERIOUS! The penalties can be as simple as having a keyword banned. For instance, your page will not show up in the search engine results any longer. They can also be more drastic, like deleting and banning your entire site from their database. In extreme instances, where multiple examples of the techniques below are used, they may even ban your entire IP (which in most instances, means every site on the server you are hosted on). This is one of the reasons that you should always host with a reputable company, who monitors what is on his or her servers.

I have mentioned FFA sites several times. I’ve done this because they are, simply, the biggest mistake (and one of the most common mistakes) that you can make in your SEO project. Free For All sites provide links to anyone that wants one, which can raise your Link Popularity, but which will do irrevocable harm to your Google PR rating. Sites with a lot of FFA links invariably have PR ratings that are very low. The only reason that FFA sites exist is so that the owners of the sites can bombard you with emails trying to get you to buy their services (you have to give your email account to get listed on the sites). Once upon a time, in the early days of the internet, FFA sites could actually help you on the search engines. The major search engines have all figured out ways to penalize you for using them though, as they feel that this would give your site an “unfair” advantage. Don’t fall into this trap.

Next, we have DoorWay Pages: The use of conventional doorway pages, which are pages that have no real content are designed just to provide additional pages and links, WILL GET YOU BANNED FROM THE SEARCH ENGINE or will get you a PR rating of 0, which means that your results will be at the very end of the results, which is just about the same thing.

Missing or Misused Title Tags: The title tag is a very important element in your SEO project. Google in fact has 100 criteria but title tag is the most important. Research your top 10 competitors for your top keyword and see what they have in their title tag. Now compare them to yours. At a minimum, you MUST have your target keyword in your title tag. Closely matching your top competitors is a great start.The search engines put a great deal of weight on keywords used in the title. A match in the title tag means a better position in the results pages. A page without a title tag has missed a huge percentage of it’s potential. Misusing Title Tags can be even more serious. If you use the same keyword repeatedly in a title tag, count on this page being removed from that keyword’s results! Another potential problem here is scripts that make the title tag dance or move; these are generally unreadable by the search engine and are just like not having a title tag at all. TIP: Use a different title name for each page, with the information that is actually on that page.

WYSIWYG editors: I hesitate to tell you not to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, but understand that they can be difficult to optimize and get truly excellent SEO results with. Examples of WYSIWYG editors are FirstPage, HotDog, Dream Weaver, etc.

Complex Scripts and Toolbars: Webmasters often try to make everything dynamic. This is a big mistake. Search engines can’t read dynamic content and they can’t read toolbar scripts. If you have an entirely graphics based or dynamic site, count on placing near the end of results. Keywords in the pages (visibly) in HTML TEXT are EXTREMELY important for SEO work.

FLASH!: See the last example. Flash sites may look great, but if you over-use them, you won’t do well in Google or the other major Search Engines.

Trying to win the Keyword war with the most common (and overused) keywords:

USING SOMEONE ELSE’S NAME OR TRADEMARK: I have put this one in all caps because I think you really need to pay attention here. If you do this, in the Meta Tags, Keywords, Title, or ANYWHERE ELSE, you are BREAKING THE LAW and you are breaking the GOLDEN RULE OF SEARCH ENGINES.

USING MISS-SPELLINGS OR ALTERATIONS ON OTHER PEOPLE’S NAMES OR TRADEMARKS: Read above, a miss-spelled word or shop and then their name is the same thing.

KeyWord Spamming: If you overuse a keyword out of context, in the Meta Tags, Title or Content…. Your SEO project will fail.

Submitting Incomplete Sites: Only submit your site once it is completed. This should be common sense, but so many people make this mistake. If the search engine doesn’t find any content (REAL CONTENT), it may not come back. Even if it does, it will be a while and you don’t want to waste valuable time. Additionally, it will be assigned a lower PR rating, which is not going to benefit you or your other sites when you start to build your links.

NO TEXT: This goes along with the dynamic content warning above. If you don’t have any HTML TEXT, the search engine isn’t going to find anything valuable on your site. You got it, that means your site doesn’t get listed and all the other work in the world won’t make a difference.

Relying on Meta Tags and Meta Tag Spamming: Meta Tags used to be the key to a successful SEO, but not any more. Certainly, you should include some well built Meta Tag content, but you shouldn’t expect it to make much difference on the major search engines. The one time when it will make a difference, though, is if you repeat the same phrase repeatedly in your keywords or keyword phrases. Keep this in mind to: Many of the search engines ignore the commas, so something like …pet food, pet door, pet vaccine, pet help, pet mat, pet this, pet that will be seen as KEYWORD SPAMMING. This means a pretty much instantaneous de-listing from the search engine, or a much lower rank anyway. Tip: One additional, beneficial, use of the Meta Tag is in the Description Tag. You can still use your description tag to give the text that the search engine will show in the search engine results (for most search engines).

Overuse of Reciprocal Links: Only use high quality outgoing links to sites that you trust. You are going to lose PR from these, unless the site you are getting the link from is a higher PR than you are, which normally doesn’t happen. They can be great for marketing, but you should only use them when they are going to benefit you in sales, not for your SEO project. Even then, limit the number or your PR will suffer.

Hidden Text. White on white background, or any other non-visible text is considered a form of spamming. Meta Tags are the only exception and they are mostly ignored, as I mentioned above.

Overusing Guestbooks and Forums on other sites! If you use your website url in your responses or in your “signature” on these sites, Google and other search engines may BAN you.

Invisible or Very Small Links To You: If the companies you get to link to you are using invisible links, they aren’t going to help. The same goes for Extremely Small Links, including graphics.

Additionally, Google may have problems with the following: Dynamic URLs, JavaScript, some DHTML, a total lack of outgoing links (yes, you need to have at least one; the exception to the rule), frames, CSS and Splash Pages.

There are a lot of gimmicks out there; few of them work. Only deal with reputable SEO specialists if you are going to get help.