That is why it is always best to also learn many other traffic generation methods like viral marketing for example.

Not only is there out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned.

The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

Basic SEO

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.

More SEO Tips

Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This page will explain most of what you should focus on along with what you should forget about.

If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings before you part with any money. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

SEO Discussion

Most SEO Professionals will not tell you about the goose that laid the golden egg. The following link will take you to a jealously guarded FREE SEO discussion.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general

You can search the forum for specific questions you may have. I like to just lurk around and read the messages.

The author, Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles with all sorts of tips for work at home webmasters. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com

Every seasoned SEO professional has their own arsenal of SEO tools which they use every day to help them rank websites. It saves time, effort and provides a strong advantage against those competitors who do not use the same tools.

Here are 11 of the SEO tools which I use on a regular basis to rank websites at the top of the search engines. You’ll note that there is a strong focus on Google – this is because ranking a website at the top of Google will, in my experience, drive anywhere between 10x and 100x the traffic of a top ranking in Yahoo or MSN combined.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides keyword suggestions based on ‘descriptive words’ or ‘website content’. Although this tool is made to assist Google Adwords advertisers, you can use it to research SEO keywords as well, by selecting ‘Exact’ from the ‘Match Type’ drop down menu. The best thing about this tool is that you can see estimated traffic volumes for exact match phrases within any country where Google has a search engine. And what better place to get keyword suggestions than from the search engine which controls the lion share of search engine traffic online?

2. Google Adwords Traffic Estimator – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides Adwords advertisers with an estimated cost of running a PPC campaign using specific keyword phrases. Use it like this: export the exact match keywords from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, paste them into the Google Traffic Estimator, select the country you are optimising in, run the search and then sort the keywords in descending order by ‘estimated cost per day’. This is a great way of identifying the keywords which may have high traffic volumes but don’t convert very well, because those phrases which do not produce revenue for advertisers will have a low cost-per-click and an overall lower estimated cost per day as a result.

3. Google Webmaster Tools – this is a free service provided by Google to provide information to website owners about how Google views their website. You can see the top search queries which produce traffic for your site, as well as the top keyword rankings which you have. You can also see how many back links each page on your site has, as well as which sites are linking to each page. Other features include uploading an XML sitemap, generating robots.txt files, removing URLs and finding broken URLs on your website. Use every tool available in the Google Webmaster Tools service.

4. XML Sitemap Generator – use this tool to generate an XML sitemap of your entire site, and then upload the sitemap inside of Google Webmaster Tools. If your site is less than 500 pages then the free version is fine. But if it is larger than 500 pages you will need to purchase the full version, which then needs to be installed on your server.

5. SearchStatus – this is a Firefox plugin which provides a range of competitor SEO analysis information through a toolbar, including PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo Backlinks, Highlighting Nofollow Links, Indexed Pages and Whois Information.

6. SEO Quake – this is another Firefox plugin which provides information similar to SearchStatus. The main difference with SEO Quake is that it displays the competitor analysis information within the search results, rather than the toolbar, which means that you can see information such as PageRank, Backlinks, and Domain Age etc. without having to actually visit a website.

7. Google Analytics – this is a free analytics service provided by Google. Simply open an account and paste the tracking code on every page of your website and you’ll be able to see a wide range of information about your website visitors. For SEO purposes, you want to look at the ‘traffic by non-paid keywords’ report to see which keywords are producing traffic for your site. Setup conversion tracking and sort the list in descending order by keywords which are producing the highest number of conversions. Keep an eye on this report to find new keywords which are driving traffic and conversions which you weren’t aware of and then focus SEO efforts on them as well.

8. WordPress – this is the leading blogging platform for SEO professionals because of the internal linking structure of the blog software as well as the customisations and plugins available. Maintaining a regularly updated WordPress blog will have significant impact on your SEO rankings.

9. Pingoat – once you have setup your blog and have posted some articles on it, use Pingoat to notify the RSS directories of your blog. This will build exposure to your blog as well as incoming links from those directories.

10. RSS Submit – similar to Pingoat, this is a piece of software which will notify additional RSS directories of your blog. To notify all of the RSS directories available in the software you will need to purchase the full version.

11. Google Trends – this is yet another free service by Google which shows the trends of particular keywords over time. You can compare the trends of multiple keywords against one another, with a specified country. As the process of ranking a website at the top of a search engine can take 12 months or more, you want to make sure that the trend of your target keyword is moving in an upwards direction.

12. SEO Elite – although this software is not free, it is great piece of software which you will need to use to monitor your ranking improvements over time, as well as analysing competitor backlinks for new linking opportunities. Although there are many free pieces of software available online, this SEO software is definitely worth the investment (note: I no longer use this software to monitor rankings as my needs have grown over time, as will yours, but this is a great piece of software to use when starting out).

As with any toolset, you will gain the maximum advantage by using all of the tools in conjunction with one another. For example, you will conduct keyword research using the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool. You then export the results into the Google Traffic Estimator. Take your top 3 phrases and put them into Google Trends. Type each of those phrases into Google. Use SearchStatus and SEO Quake to research your competitors, and so on…

The process of ranking a website at the top of Google takes a long, focused, consistent effort and is difficult even at the best of times. Using every tool you have at your disposal will give you an unfair advantage and will make the process that much easier.

Orignal Author : Alex Cleanthous @ webprofits.com.au