Play by the Rules and Win!

SEO relys on common sense.

SEO or search engine optimization, is the practice of using particular words and HTML codes in certain ways to garner the top spots in the free search engine listings.

1. Develop a short list of key words or key phrases that you believe people will enter into a search engine to get to your site. Note: you should assume the searcher does not know the name of your company, but may know some relevant facts such as what town, city or state you operate in, portions of your phone number or zip code, or other search criteria. Now, ask some friends or associates who do not necessarily need to know anything about your website.. or may, but asks them, "What do you think people would search for to find a web site like mine". Remember average people may not know the technical terminology related to your site.
   
   
2. Stay away from tricky, slick, flashy web site design. Frash animations, frames, javascripts and other advanced design tools and techniques do not fare well with search engine crawlers. A crawler is a type of program the search engine uses to index the pages on your site. Crawlers, (also called spiders, robots or simply 'bots'), prefer simple navigation and read in your site in a recursize manner, much as human who clicked and followed each link on your site, read every word along the way, and then returned to the top level and followed the next branch down through the levels of your site. Like a human, if the bot can not navigate easily, it will miss things, and most likely leave before seeing all the content you have to offer.
   
   
3. Have a site map. There is, perhaps no page as important as the site map when designing a search optimized site. (It also helps human visitors find your content). Design your site map using the H1, H2, H3, etc heading tags, most search engines index headings applying significance to text displayed as higher value, (H1, H2..), headings. Using nested unordered list, (UL, LI), structure with appropriate H# headings results in an easy to read, easy to follow, properly ranked list of your content pages, and search engines and humans alike will reward you by visiting more often and staying on your site longer.
   
   
4. Create a ROBOTS.TXT file This plain text file should be located in the root directory of the website. Search engines look for this file before entering a site to see what directories and files they are allowed (or disallowed) from indexing. Visit www.robots.org for more information about 'robots.txt' files and the 'Standards for Robots Exclusion'.
   
   
5. Use META tags The META description and META keywords tags are the most relevant, but META refresh, author, expires, revisit, and other tags are used by some search engines and directories to more accurately index your content. Google and other search engines have their own engine specific tags you can use to control how that engine deals with your pages. META ROBOTS tags like NOFOLLOW, NOINDEX, NOCACHE can be used to control crawl behavior at page or directory specific levels.