While this used to be a great boost, its less important now, however if you are starting from scratch with a new site, you’d be wise to explore options that contain some relevant keywords.

The search engines are actually trying to help your visitors to find you, if your information is pertinent to them. Build a good useful site for your users first and let the optimization be the icing on top. You should always question any SEO tactics that decease the communication value of your site.

Don’t just guess you know what people are looking for, use tools to verify the traffic of each keyword phrase before you settle on the ones you are going to integrate. Try out various keyword combinations and find out where you have a chance to get an edge over the competition. In most cases a weaker site will do better going for some lower searched and less competitive words then going right for the top dog.

Visitors and search engines see the bold, clickable links and HEADLINES first. The clearer you make these elements, it can help on both fronts. Keep your navigation clear and well named for the same reason. Linked text to deeper content can be a great way to keep pages crisp and content focused while allowing deeper exploration for some visitors and more keyword opportunities at the same time.

Meta tags remain important for your search engine visibility, less so these day for users. Each pages title should be unique to the content on that page, and the description unique to increase click throughs. Stay away from ALL CAPS and don’t repeat words in it. Only repeat the name of your site if it includes a high powered keyword in it. Otherwise save the space for good descriptive content.

After much abuse, the best practices here are changing. A safe place to start is to do things that are good for your business. If you are a local business, you’d probably seek to get listed on certain local and industry specific directories, that’s probably safe and good. If you are active in social that’s a help, though “nofollow” links are becoming more common out there, so you won’t get strength from them. PR drops can be helpful depending on who picks them up. Basically the rule of thumb here (for starers anyway) is if its good for your business and it inlcudes a link, it’s a pretty safe move. The links where you find yourself saying “Why would I want to add THAT link to my site?” you might want to stay away form.

Most search engine will appreciate seeing this list of all the pages on your site. Save it right in the site root as an .xml file, or better still, link it up via Google Webmaster Tools which you should also be using along with analytics.

If you are not an SEO professional, this can all be confusing, stressful, or downright maddening. Take what morsels from here that you find helpful and remember that your first responsibility it to you visitors. At the end of the day, Google is really trying to connect your great content to folks looking for it. If you think there is something dreadfully wrong and you site is just not being found as is should, fill out our free checkup form and we’ll take a peek and see what can be done in your specific case.