Again I apologize for not having time to write more - The list is based on observations I commonly see on a day to day basis. If you notice your website with any of these, either bury your head in the sand or change it immediately to see better search engine rankings!

1. Using the same keyword more than twice in a Title tag - Having the same keyword listed in your heading 3 times or more will in fact reduce the relevance and strength of those keywords. Most important factor is that it’s readable to the user and is an accurate description of your page.

2. High keyword densities - Including your targeted keyword is obviously important but don’t think for one minute putting the keyword in every link on the page and in every paragraph will make your page more relevant - it won’t.

3. Not having a Valid XML Sitemap - Create one and submit it to the webmaster consoles on the major search engines.

4. URL’s not containing any keywords - Yes, I’m still seeing utterly useless URL structures. Just remember to include an accurate description of the page content in the URL.

5. Using <H1> tags more than once on a single page - There should only be one <h1> tag per page.

6. Not giving each page unique Meta data - should be relevant to each page’s content and unique - you will see benefits in doing this - trust me!

7. Using the same anchor text in all links - Unless you have been around for years, just don’t bother using the same anchor texts in your links. Make them as varied as possible, you will see see an increase in your targeted keywords if your site is optimized properly.

8. Putting analytics code at the beginning of your body content - Doing this will slow down the page content load which will effect usability. The amount of time is not large but noticeable to search engines, always put it at the end of the </body> tag.

9. Not using accurate image descriptions - Stuffing keywords in image descriptions will do nothing for you and may even harm your rankings if used excessively.

10. Not having a 301 redirect setup - It’s not hard to do and it will help with your indexing like you wouldn’t believe!

If you have just setup a new website or your small business has just gone “live” for the first time then I hope I can help you save money.

Once your website is live you may of course wonder why you are not receiving tens of thousands of visitors. Surely everyone needs or wants your product or service? A little rule, even if you were giving out free gold bars very few people would know about it – although I imagine your website would become popular by word of mouth - that’s a whole other story!

How do I get traffic to my awesome website?

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. PPC (Pay Per Click)
3. Affiliate Marketing
4. Social Marketing
5. DM (Direct Mail)
6. Email
7. Word of mouth

The bad news is that most of these options will cost you money, and to achieve large numbers of targeted traffic it will cost a lot! I will attempt to give you new websites some very basic tips to follow and implement that a lot of “SEO companies” would charge well over £1000 for.

Some basic tips

You will of course need some basic HTML knowledge for this, although some points require no prior experience.

1. Make each page Title unique to the page; keep the length to 60 characters or under. Any more and the search engines will not list the words in the results but you will see little dots…

Example:

<title>Important Keyword | Relevance Word | Company Name</title>

2. Create a Meta description that describes your page in a readable format; consider it a window to your larger shop.

Example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Important Keyword is a service or product in the keyword industry by company name.”>

3. Create a Meta Keywords tag, and include words that might not appear in your copy and misspellings of your keywords.

Example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”related keyword, 2nd related keyword, related industry, misspelled keyword 1, misspelled keyword 2 “>

4. Make your <h1> tags contain the most important keywords on each page – only one <h1> tag per page.

<h1>Keyword</h1>

5. Make your <h2> tags contain your less targeted keywords

<h2>Less important keyword</h2>

6. Give all your images “Alt” descriptions, these should describe the images perfectly

<img src=”imagelocation.com” alt=”Keyword in a situation” />

7. Create an XML sitemap

Visit: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ - to have one generated for you

8. Submit your XML sitemap to each webmaster console

Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
MSN - http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster

9. Submit your website to a list of trusted directories. A good list can be found here:

http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/

10. Make any links on your site include keywords rather than “click here” or “read more”

<a href =”URLdestination.com”>Keyword</a>

The list above is just some basic standards to follow. Of course if you have a good website built for you then some of these will not be an issue, you will be surprised though.

Find some free backlinks

It amazes me how lazy some people are, I see many “SEO companies” charge anything between £50.00 - £1000 just for 250 backlinks – these often tend to be non-relevant so actually do very little for your search rankings.

This is how I find relevant backlinks, granted it may be time consuming but it’s cheaper or often free and the results actually work.

1. Go to http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
2. Enter a competitors website
3. Look at the results

You will often find free resource sites and directories that carry some weight using this tool. If not you will see where “the enemy” are getting their links from – which you can follow.

You can also use another tactic whereby you write comments on blogs that count as backlinks:

http://www.dofollowblogs.com/
http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/2007/07/20/over-160-relevant-link-following-blogs/

To finish this post off I will just add a few more tips, more server side that are always recommended. I would guess for sure that if you implemented all I have listed here, a new, un-optimised website would benefit from it (I guarantee that some SEO companies will charge well over £1000 for this sort of work)

Final Tips

• Implement a 301 redirect on your domain, if you do not know how, visit the link below:

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

• Make sure your URL structures contain keywords:

Example: http://www.yourdomainwithkeyword.com/productnamewithkeyword

More value has been given to the ownership and authentication of domains as of late. Just a few years ago and a basic HTML sitemap would have been substantial enough to keep the search engines happy. Times have changed and with it comes the era of XML valid sitemaps. I always create a XML sitemap for clients, doing this helps the search engines identify pages within the website that perhaps have endured indexing issues.

So what do I do with my sitemap once its uploaded?

Once your shiny new sitemap is live and uploaded to your root directory of your website you need to let the big boys know where it is. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own form of a “webmaster console”. This console is an area where you submit your sitemap to each search engine, you will also need to add a random HTML file or add a line of Meta data to your index page – this is just a bit of protection against people trying to hack your data – it validates that you own the domain.

Once your sitemap is submitted and you have validated that you are the rightful owner of your domain you are open to a world of knowledge about your domain and its performance. Each console has varying features, undoubtedly Google offers the most (as you would expect) but each is useful in its own way.

The locations to each console can be found here:

Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
MSN - http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster

For a more detailed explanation of sitemaps visit Google’s page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34654

If you are lazy and want a sitemap created automatically then visit this site: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

I was randomly searching the web yesterday when I stumbled across a search box within Google’s search results.

Initially I thought it was a direct search function within the site but after testing it just searches the indexed pages that contain the searched keyword(s).

This function can be performed by any site by typing the following code into Google:

KEYWORD site: yourdomain.com

Other related posts on this topic:

• Search box in search results
• First search box

I have been looking closely at the relation between new blog posts along side my primary targeted keywords, even if they are not directly related. It’s safe to say that if you right about a subject i.e. “Page Rank” then for a week or two you might see some temporary search engine position increase for that keyword.

What I have seen over the last few weeks is that if you write a popular blog piece then non direct related keyword phrases can also achieve a boost. On the 4th of February I wrote a successful piece of link bait – 25 websites all SEO’s should know. I received plenty of additional backlinks and got around 8k unique visitors as a result.

The week that followed I naturally saw an increase of organic traffic as a result of the post, but surprisingly I found myself at position 6 on Google for the phrase “SEM blog”. Since that discovery the position has since moved down a bit (to the second or third page). In that time frame I received around 600 unique visitors for that term alone. That phrase is not mentioned at all in the original post and the backlinks I received did not use the phrase as an anchor – so why an increase in a keyword phrase that has not been targeted?

As well as an increase in backlinks and blog posts the post was heavily visible on social networks, bookmarking sites, which lead to an overall increase in my blog traffic. By writing a post on a related (although not directly associated) topic can lead to your blog/website achieving an overall increase in search positions. My total organic traffic increased by around 30% for a period of 2 weeks.

To me this just adds to my argument that websites in 2008 should use the blog platform more than ever to help with organic listings.