SEO How-To
Search Engine Optimization -- the process of making a site "search engine-friendly" — is probably the most important aspect of website design. Many, many commercial websites are designed and set up by people who know little or nothing about search engine optimization — how to give the search engines what they want to see when they index your site. This long page contains the information (or links to it) that they SHOULD know about optimizing a website for the search engines.

The most important thing to know about search engines is that SEARCH ENGINES ONLY INDEX TEXT. Make that your mantra while designing and optimizing your website. They don't index images, and they don't index Flash well. Although there are some exceptions to that rule, as search engines are becoming more intelligent and more able to index files such as PDFs and the captions of graphic files, and some of the text in a Flash file — for all practical purposes just remember that rule: Search engines only index text and you won't go too far wrong in search engine optimization.
There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better treatment in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select.

You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it's not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That's a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don't bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a "contact us" or "privacy policy" or "copyright info" pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find — those pages with content about your service or product--whatever you are selling.

Source:http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Search Engine Optimization – Let's get started!
To get a good feel for what is required in optimizing a normal commercial website for the search engines, let's pretend we're creating a website which sells after-market accessories for the "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", a 70's 4-door sports car that provides a snap-your-head-back kind of driving experience. (It is a car with a small but fanatical base of fans.) Our site will sell floor mats, hood ornaments, key chains, steering wheels, and so on -- all for the Alfa Romeo Alfetta.


Alfa Romeo Alfetta

Pick a Good Domain Name
This step is not very important - but every little bit helps. For the perfect domain name matchup in a search engine so that a page of our "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" website comes up #1 in the search results, the website itself would be best named:

http://www.alfa-romeo-alfetta.com

For more info on picking a good domain name for optimum search engine placement, and what you can do if you already have a domain name that isn't very good in this respect, click here. Don't sweat it if you haven't got a great domain name, you can skip this step. This aspect of search engine optimization doesn't count for much, just a little.

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Pick a Good Web Hosting Company
What type of website hosting company do you have? This can be very important to the search engines. Free website hosting is usually bad for search engine rankings, for several reasons. For a detailed article about how your website hosting company can affect your rankings in the search engines by Larisa Thomason (Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic), click here.

The most important factor is that your website should have its own "static" IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL--that's called a "dynamic" IP Address and is typical of Windows NT Hosting. Big hosting companies typically use "dynamically assigned" IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company's server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don't like this, for various technical reasons.

But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some "bad hats" (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned "by association" because, to the Search Engine your site's IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address -- the one that belongs to your web hosting company.

If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If you don't know whether you do or not, call or email your web hosting company and find out whether your IP address for your site is static or dynamic. If it a static IP address, they should be able to tell you exactly what your static numeric IP address is. Find out what that is. For example, the static numeric IP address for Words in a Row is: 65.38.173.39. You should be able to substitute your numeric IP address after the "http://______", type that into your browser and go directly to your website.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Picking a Good Domain Name for
Better Search Engine Placement
How to pick a good domain for better search engine placement as part of optimizing your site for the search engines during the design phase.
For the perfect domain name matchup in a search engine so that a page of our "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" website comes up #1 in the search results, the website would be named:

http://www.alfa-romeo-alfetta.com

The website name would equal exactly the keywords in the search. Picking the correct domain name for a website is a good first step and can help a lot in how near the top of the search engine rankings your site shows up when someone searches for your key words. It certainly won't hurt to have a great domain name that exactly describes your website.

You can find out which domain names are available by going to this site: Faster WhoIs or Domain Name Soup. Enter possible names for your website. If the name is taken, it will tell you. If you find a good one is still available, you can go to www.registerwizards.com and register it cheaply and easily. Play around with some other names for your site -- get creative, and don't forget about the .net and .org and .tv possibilities.

(As an aside: If you need a good, cheap web hosting company -- the best one we've found, and the one we use and recommend to our clients, is Data393 They offer a lot of practical features and are very responsive - and inexpensive.)

Some people frown on using hyphens in a domain name--but hyphens can work fine as part of a secondary domain name. Some of the search engines recognize the words between the hyphens in a domain name and give your site better placement for them. Every little bit helps.

You have the option of using this second domain name for your site solely for the purpose of registering it with the search engines for good placement of your website. So what if it ends in .net or .org, or has hyphens in it -- who cares? It won't matter. For your normal marketing purpose, you can always stick with the domain name you already have, ending in .com and without any hyphens. It's true that most people will think your website should end in dot com, and it can be a real hassle to have to tell them there are a couple of hyphens in it every time you tell someone your URL.

If you have already registered a domain name and it is not what you'd like, don't despair. You can register as many domain names as you like for $15.00 each per year through www.registerwizards.com and have them all point to the same website (IP address). A lot of the good domain names are gone, but if you find a better name than the one you have, great! Snag it and have it point to your IP address. If not, write this step off and move on!

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/domain.html

Top SEO Technical Rules for Building a Search Engine Friendly Website
Top SEO points to keep in mind when designing a site to be search engine friendly.

SEO Technical Points
These are the basic SEO technical rules to keep in mind when building a website for which you hope to get good search engine placement:

Remember that "search engines only index text", and that the first portion of a page is the most important as far as the search engines are concerned. Keep the page tightly coded, don't spread it out with "HTML Tidy" or dilute it with extra spaces, line returns, etc. Your mantra while building the site should be: "Search Engines Only Index Text".



Make sure your server is set up correctly, with a static (unchanging) numeric IP address assigned to your site. To check, use this tool provided by Bruce Clay, one of the leading lights in the search engine optimization world. (Be sure to change the end of the line first to put in your domain name!): http://www.bruceclay.com/cgi-b...e-here.com

Put Your URL to Check in this box:


Your site has to pass that test or else your site will "look" cloaked to Google.



Use minimal JavaScript (none, if possible). Use minimal or no Flash. Search engines don't index either Flash or JavaScript very well, especially in flyout or dropdown menus. You can do a lot with CSS to emulate a flyout menu or dropdown menu that the search engines can read and follow. For details of how to set up a CSS-only flyout menu, see this site: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/c.../demo.html

If you absolutely MUST use JavaScript menus, don't put the code for them into the head of the page. Instead, put the Javascript in an external file (such as "myscript.js") and call the JavaScript from the external file, like this:

<script language="JavaScript" src="myscript.js" type="text/JavaScript"></script>

Search engines tend to ignore JavaScript, so if you call the external files they can easily ignore it (the searchbots don't call those external JavaScript files) and won't have to wade through hundreds of lines of JavaScript code to get to your TEXT, which is all that the Search Engines care about.



Don't use nested tables to lay out the site. Instead learn and use CSS. Make sure the CSS is valid. Check the validity here:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-valid...-name.html or use this box:

 

If you absolutely MUST use tables to lay out the site,  you should use the "Table Trick" to put the code for the TEXT content of the page ahead of the code for a left-hand navigation bar.  See the table trick here: http://www.wordsinarow.com/tabletrick.html.

If you MUST use tables, put a summary attribute in the main table tag - it will help the search engines figure out what the table is about. Summary attributes work like this:

<table summary="keyword for the page goes here">



Declare a "doctype" at the very top of each page you write, such as:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>

Use either HTML 4.01 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 and keep the code valid. Check the validity of your HTML code on one of these two sites:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=  


http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ URL:
Include warnings Show input Validate entire site Hide valid results



Declare a character-set type in the <head> of every page, like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

or this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

And then STICK WITH THAT CHARACTER SET--don't use characters that aren't in the character set you select. You can blow off one of the search engine robots by putting characters in your page that it is not expecting.



Set up a site map that has a direct link to every page of the site on it. Make sure there is a text link to the site map from the home page. If you are using JavaScript menus this is absolutely vital as the search engines may not be able to follow the links to the rest of your pages from your home page - unless you have a plain text link to your site map from the home page.



Set up a links page to link to other sites so you can reciprocate links with them. Link TO your own links page from the site map page only in order not to "leak" page rank.



Make sure every page has at least 250 words of text on it. 500 words is preferable. Use the keywords for the page but don't stuff them in everywhere. Anywhere you can turn a pretty picture of text into actual text, do so. Use <h1> and <h2> headings where they make sense. Style them with CSS so they don't add ugly spaces to your pages.



Don't use any deprecated tags (including the old <font> tag) to style your text.  Style only with CSS or valid HTML.



Don't use frames to lay out your site - search engines can't index a site built in frames because all pages of the site look exactly the same to it. The search engines run into the same problem you run into when you try to "bookmark" a site built using frames you can't do it and neither can the search engines. A site built in frames has no chance in the search engines, even with a "noframes" tag - in my experience the <noframes> tags don't help enough to make it worthwhile to use them.

So don't hide your site from the search engines with frames.

"Virtual includes" work even better than frames to make it easy to separate out menus that are the same from one page to another, to put copyright notices at the bottoms of the pages, and so on, and virtual includes should be used instead of frames. See this link for details about Virtual Includes.



Don't use JavaScripted automatic popup windows on your home page or on any page that you want the search engines to index.



Don't require your visitors to accept a cookie when visiting your site - that will kill the Googlebot dead. Search engine spiders are non-responsive, meaning they can't interact with your site. All they can do is read text and follow links. That's all. They can't and won't allow you to set a session ID for their visit, so DON'T TRY TO MAKE THEM.



If you must use a database to display information, make the links "search engine-friendly". Use no more than one variable in the URL. If you use two or more variables to pass information to your display pages, the search engines may not follow the links. They may follow one variable in a link, but not more than that. In other words, if you are selling green widgets from a page of your site, don't set up your site so the links look like this:

http://www.xyz.com/home.asp?ID...ct_ID=2334

Those long URLs with multiple variables are not always indexed by Google. Avoid using them! There are methods available, using either ASP or PHP, to pull the information from a database, but using keywords in the page names, like this:

http://www.xyz.com/green-widgets.php

Which of those two page names do you think is more likely to come up at the top of the search engines?



There are many more fine "do's and don'ts" to keep in mind when building a site that is as search engine friendly as it can be--but THESE points will keep you from building a site that the search engines simply can't index.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo...oints.html

Now take the numeric IP address from that report and type it in your browser after typing "http://" *mdash; don't put in "www" — just type the four numbers after the "http://" — if it returns a "page not found" or some site other than yours! -- you have a dynamic IP address. If your site shows up in your browser, then that four-part number is your static IP address. (Many thanks to Bruce Clay for providing this tool!)

We like the website hosting from Data393 for many reasons - one of them is that they will set up hosted websites on their server with static IP addresses. If your hosting company does not offer static IP addresses, my advice is that you should change web hosting companies. Data393 is a good choice but not your only choice -- you could also use Verio or many others. In 2007, even Godaddy.com offers cheap hosting with a dedicated static IP address for an extra $3.00/month. WebWizards.net also offers inexpensive hosting and a dedicated static IP address. Words in a Row also offers hosting, but only to our marketing or web design clients.

Unless you are locked into a proprietary shopping cart or content management system, it is not usually very difficult or expensive to move your site from one hosting company to another. Just make sure your new hosting company gives you a static IP address and that your site passes through the Bruce Clay analysis tool (the form above) without any problems.

In our experience, with all other factors being equal, the site with its own static IP address will rise to the top at the search engines over those with dynamic IP addresses. This is something your hosting company may dispute--especially if they don't provide static IP addresses. Approximately 97% of all IP addresses on the web are dynamically assigned, so do not be surprised if your site has a dynamic IP address when you check it.

Here's a blog post from BruceClay.com about their tests of static vs. dynamic IP addresses to see if they really make a difference in search engine rankings.

Here's an article from Michael Banks Valentine of About.com, about "Playing Hide and Seek with Search Engines". It explains in detail some of the ways your server setup can make your site a problem in the search engines.

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Figure Out Your Key Word Phrases
Your next step should be to do some homework and figure out what your key word phrases should be for your website pages. You need to make a short list of 1 or 2 key word phrases for each page of the site you want to optimize. Each phrase should be no more than three or four words. It is okay if the same words are in more than one key word phrase, and it is okay if some of the pages overlap their keyword phrases.

For each page you should wind up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.

For more info about picking the right key word phrases for your website, click here. There are several tools that will help you pick the right keywords.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Set up your Meta Tags
There are several "tags" that go into the HTML code for a page of a website. These tags are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>. These are invisible to the average person browsing the site but are used by the search engines when they come crawling through your site and index the pages--a process called "spidering". These tags should be present on every page of the website. The most important tags are:

The <title> tag

and the "description" <meta> tag.
The "keyword" <meta> tag used to be important but is basically useless now.

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Set up your <Title> Tag
Our site would contain a <title> tag like this:

<title>Alfa Romeo Alfetta Accessories</title>

What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" at least once. It shouldn't contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like "and" and "for", which the search engines ignore anyway) you're better off.

The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. Google in particular places heavy emphasis on what is in your page's <title> tag. So does MSN.

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Set up your Meta Keyword Tag
The <meta> keyword tag will contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name="keywords" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta, automobile accessories, aftermarket, hood ornaments, floor mats, auto parts, blah, blah, blah">

Don't make this more than about 250 characters long. Don't use the same key word more than three times in it. Vary the capitalization. Don't use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like "SEO", which is short for Search Engine Optimization.

Note: Don't obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn't belong into it. You can almost skip it entirely.

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Set up your Meta Description Tag
The <meta> description tag is a description of the page. It should contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name="description" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta accessories, blah, blah, blah">

This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in his search. Don't make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!

We won't repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called "spamdexing", which is "spamming" the index of a search engine. For more info on how to avoid spamming the search engines, click here.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Put Key Words in Headings
Back to our Alfa Romeo Alfetta site: It will have "headings" like the one at the top of this section. It was created using heading tags that look like this: <H4>Put Key Words in Headings</H4>.

These "headings" make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:

<h1>Alfa Romeo Alfetta</h1>


<h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Hood Ornaments</h2>


<h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Maintenance Manuals</h2>


<h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Floor Mats</h2>


and so on through as many headings (in this case our products for sale) as we can think of that we want to include on that page.
Headings like that are weighted heavily in the search engines -- many of them use a formula that LIKES the key words in headings more than elsewhere in the site. Don't neglect these. Use them to set off areas of text, in the same way this page you are reading is divided up by headings.

Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:

<H1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;">This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>

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Use Key Words in Your Text
Our optimized page would contain TEXT of at least 250 words, with the key word phrase "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" occurring several times near the beginning of the text. If a page doesn't contain at least 250 words, some search engines won't bother to index it. It's preferable to have 500 words or more if possible, on a page. You'll get better results from the search engines if you have more text.

It also seems to help to put the key word phrase near the end of the text, too. Search engines use a factor called "key word density" to determine how relevant that key word you're using is to the page. If it shows up a few times in the text, it is more "dense". Key word density is a good thing, up to a certain point. The main thing is to make sure you have some text that describes what you do or what you're selling - that makes your page a resource worth indexing.

In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That's only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won't make it far enough into the page to index the text. They'll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code.

There's a trick of the <table> one can use to keep your menu bar on the left side of the page (where most people put a navigation menu) and still have the text of the page come first in the code. Normally to display to the left, the nav bar has to come first in the code. But not if you use this table trick.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Put Key Words in Alt Tags
 
Pictures on a website can and should contain a little text description that only shows up when you move your mouse over the picture. That little description is called an "ALT tag" ("ALT" is short for "alternate"). Hold your mouse over the picture on the right for a couple of seconds and your browser will display the ALT tag for the picture in most browsers.

Some search engines index those ALT tags, so we will make sure we label every picture with an ALT tag--every last picture. Wherever it is possible and appropriate, each ALT tag will contain our main key word phrase — "Alfa Romeo Alfetta".

Note: Some people surf with "pictures" turned off, to speed up their browsing. The visually handicapped also use the ALT tags to "see" what's on a picture--there is special software for the blind which reads aloud to the person what's on the page. If there are no alt tags, the pictures are invisible to them, so it is worthwhile to put an alt tag on every picture. If you can appropriately place some key words in those alt tags, so much the better.

This article by Robin Nobles quotes SEO researcher Jerry West's research showing that the alt tag is not used by the main search engines at all. My own research tells me that alt tags are only a small part of what the search engines do look at. Even so, I still recommend that you put alt tags on all images (because that is one thing needed to make your HTML code "valid", and that you put keywords in the alt tags of any images that you use as links where using keywords would be appropriate in helping to describe the image to someone who cannot view the image (i.e., someone who is visually impaired or who is using a text only browser). My research shows that some search engines do use those alt tags describing the image used as a link to determine what the page they point to is about.

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Put Key Words in Anchor Tags
Hypertext links on your site usually look something like this:

<a href="floor-mats.html">. Those are called "anchor tags" — that's what the "a" stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:

Sample Anchor Tag:

<a href="blah.html" title="Alfa Romeo Alfetta floor mats"> Alfa Romeo Floor Mats </a>

-- if the link points to the floor mats page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These "titles" for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Is a Robots Tag Necessary?
In our experience, a Robots meta tag with instructions to index and follow the links on the page is simply ignored by the search engines. You can safely omit the robots tag if that's all you have been using it for. In the old days of the net (a few years ago) you would have put this tag in the head of your document:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

It might have done some good a few years back - in today's world it can safely be omitted.

The robots meta tag is more useful for pages you do not want indexed. If you don't want a page to be indexed -- such as a test page, or a page you put up for your own use, then put this robots tag in the head of your document:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

That will keep the page out of the search engines that recognize and follow these tags. Of course, to actually prevent the page from being indexed by the search engines, you need to add the page name to the robots.txt file as one of the disallowed files. A robots meta tag is not enough to prevent the page from being indexed by some of the search engines that ignore them completely.

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Use a robots.txt file
Make an empty file. Name it "robots.txt". Put it in the root directory of your server; usually this is the same directory where your index.html file is kept. (But not always - sometimes your index.html file is in a sub-directory. In which case, make sure you have a copy of the robots.txt file in the root directory - usually the root directory is as high as you can go in the directory tree on your server.

While it is possible to set up a "robots.txt" file to exclude some or all of the search engine robots, what you probably want it to do is to allow every robot that comes along to index your site. If you do want to exclude specific robots from indexing certain directories or certain files, you will have to put some commands into the robots.txt file. For more info than you probably want about the use of the "robots.txt" file, go here. If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty — but make sure it is there!

Experience has taught me that on some servers, it is wisest to put something in that robots.txt file and put it in both the root directory and in the directory where your index.html file is located. This text works inside the robots.txt file, to allow robots to access everything except what is noted:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/That example lets the robots coming to your site index everything except what is in your cgi-bin directory, your tmp directory, and your private directory.

Here is an article called "Search Engine Spiders lost without Guidance" by Mike Banks Valentine, which covers in detail many aspects of creating a robots.txt file.

You can validate your existing robots.txt file using this robots.txt validator tool from searchengineworld.com.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Validate your HTML code.
Everybody knows that robots, in general, are not too smart. The search engine robots which gather information from your site can really only do two things: 1. Read text. 2. Follow links. That's all.

These days, modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag - for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren't closed -- then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site. To validate your site, use this link: http://validator.w3.org/. This will tell you where your HTML code is "busted" and needs to be fixed so you don't confuse the search engine spiders. There's plenty of advice there on how to make your HTML code validate. If you or your webmaster can't figure out how to make your HTML code valid, we can help with that. (Note: sadly, this page you're looking at right now doesn't validate - but it will be made valid as soon as we can get to it in the next update of this site!)

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Register by Hand with the Search Engines and Directories.
As soon as the website is finished and up on the web, it should be submitted to (registered with) the search engines (like Google and MSN) and directories (like Yahoo! and the ODP). Most of these are free -- some of them charge up to $300 for submitting your website. Don't scrimp here. If people can't find your site it is doomed.

There are several programs that can automate this process for you -- but we don't recommend them because, in our experience, they do not get as good of results as you get when you register your website by hand.

We've set up a page to make it easy to register with the search engines and directories by hand, here.

Then it will take some time (expect it to take several months) for the search engines to actually index and begin listing our site. Some of them only take a day or two, others take months. We have to be patient. But eventually we would be highly placed in a search for "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", on the first page of the search results in most of the search engines. We could expect to be the first result on some of them for our keyword search for our keywords, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta"!

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Don't Neglect The Little Things
What are the three most often neglected opportunities for getting better rankings in the search engines? Click here to find out.

Get Links Pointing To Your Site
After our website is created and put up on a server and registered with the search engines, we would then go out and find as many other websites as possible that might have an interest in linking from their site to ours, contact them and convince them to set up such links. We might have to offer reciprocal links back to their sites in order to convince them. There's no harm in that, you WANT lots of links from your site to other sites--that's one easily-provided free service you can give away.

Here's some good advice from About.com on the subject of "How to Request Links".

Don't bother with the Free For All Links pages. FFA links pages don't work, and no one actually uses them. You want websites that are similar to yours, or which provide related services, or which contain specialty listings or directories of your type of business.

The rule is: The more links there are to our site, the more relevance it will have in some search engine results and the better placement it will get. A lone website with no links to it is a sad thing. It has no friends. Get plenty of links to your site. Ten links to your site is a good start. A thousand wouldn't be too many.

To see which sites are currently linked to your site, go to Google and type in your domain name like this:

mydomainnamehere.com

Of course, you'd substitute your actual domain name instead of mydomainnamehere.com.

Then click on the link to "Find web pages that contain the term 'mydomainnamehere.com'." That will give a list of websites that Google shows linking to yours. [Note that the Google toolbar's "backlinks" function is broken and has been for a few years — it gives incorrect results.]

MarketLeap's link analysis tool lets you put in your URL and find out the number of links to your site that are being reported by Google, Hotbot, Yahoo, AOL and MSN all at once.

There are several places online where you can work with other webmasters and site owners to get links TO your site. These include Link Partners (a free service), Links Manager (a paid service), and Links-Pal with some free and some paid linking services. We list more of them on our page covering how to get links.

Here is a helpful article on how to get worthwhile in-bound links, SEO One-way Web Links: 5 Strategies, by Joel Walsh.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Page Rank and Links
Page rank is Google's way of measuring your rank in terms of links to your site from other sites, based on both quantity and quality. Google page rank varies from 0 (terrible) to 10 (ideal). If you have lots of links from sites with low page ranks, they will mean very little to your page rank, whereas even a few links from other sites with good page ranks can make a difference. That doesn't mean you should cancel existing links -- they still have value.

Your page rank is a good indicator of how your link campaign is going. You want to be at 5 or above. Here is a link to a free page rank tool that tells you any URL's page rank across all the Google data centers.

Having a good page rank at Google is great, as it will help you place above similar sites at Google (page rank is likely a strong part of the algorithm that decides placement when other factors are equal). However, we recommend you track it primarily because the factors that Google tracks as part of your page rank are universal. Improving your page rank will improve your entire web presence, in addition to your placement at Google.

As of October 2005, underhanded sites can now fake their page rank. So, if a site with a page rank equal to or higher than yours contacts you about trading links, we recommend checking their page rank as part of your standard actions. Use this page rank fraud detection tool from SEO Logs. The tool works by telling you the correct page rank for the site that you input, so whatever it displays is the real page rank, regardless of what displays when you browse to that site.

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Disclaimer
Disclaimer: While SEO is very important in order to get visitors coming to your site from the search engines, it is not the only thing you should be doing to get traffic to your site. Here's an excellent article about some of the other important avenues to use to get visitors to your site.

Source: http://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

Good enough information are here for SEO.


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Thanks,
Muthukumar Selvarasu,
Project Manager,
Webmasters Ltd.