Here are some simple tips that will help you get started with your website's seo. I am sure most of you know many of these tips; however, it never hurts to repost them every now and then. 1. Title tag - to help the search engine know what the page is about. Title tag is right at the top of your page within the ‘head’ tags. Placing the keyword here will attract focussed traffic to your website. Since it is the text in the title tag that is visible to the traffic, use the text keyword there. 2. The keywords you use in the anchor text must be the ones used to link to that page with other pages on your website. Try and link as many keywords as possible to a specific page. 3. The text in the title tag must also appear in the body of the page so that the search engines know that it relates to the title. It will also let your traffic know that they are in the right place for the info they are looking for. The same keywords must be used in the text of the content on the page. 4. Avoid using the same title tag on all pages of your website. If you do this, the search engines will assume that all pages are identical and wont index them. Use the headline of your page as the title tag. This will tell the search engines what the page pertains to and index it. 5. Keyword stuffing is bad practice. Spamming the description or keyword meta tag must also be avoided. 6. Forget about link farms - search engines don’t approve of them. when you link to another site, you must make sure that the content is complementary and relates to your site. 7. In your navigation menu, put links instead of images - search engines cannot read images. Instead, use keywords in these links so that when your visitor has the mouse over these links the title of the link is visible to them. 8. If you have to have images, describe them with the alt tag. Search engines will find it easy to index these images and find your page. it will also help view your website in any browser. 9. Preferably go for manually submitting your website to the search engines. The use of submission software could make you end up paying a penalty or even getting banned. Once submitted, the search engine robots will follow your links and index your website. 10. You must also use your keywords in domain name, file names and folders. Make sure you have a site map for your website for easy navigation. Good content goes without saying.
You do know that search engines don't use the keywords meta element anymore due to spam abuse in the past? Lets not forget how important the actual filename of the image, it should also contain keywords\phrases inside the actual filename. This only promotes via Google Image Search, not the web page index. Actually, building backlinks is the primary way to induce indexing, you just need to submit to digg or mixx and you'll begin the indexing the same day, results should show with the index search operator in a few days. XML Sitemap is better than a standard html sitemap, it's the current standard used by search engines.