- Keep your link pages to a reasonable length. Including hundreds of outgoing links on a page is not a good idea. The search engines know that these pages have very little value to your site visitors. How are they going to find anything relevant amongst 200 links? Instead focus on creating pages that are valuable to your visitors. Include descriptions for the links and keep it to a reasonable number. If you offer link partners a good quality. It's a win-win situation!



- Look for words to add to your keywords to make them more specific. The more relevant your keywords, the better. If you are using keywords that are generic and common, the search engines will be unable to give your site appropriate consideration. Whenever possible, try to clarify your keywords with additional words in order to make your site stand out to the search engines. For example, if you sell widgets maybe it makes sense to create pages optimized for "blue widgets", "red widgets" and "green widgets".

- Let the search engines find you naturally instead of submitting your site. The best way to make sure the search engines know about your site is to get links on relevant sites, directories and blogs and let them follow those links to find your site. Although all of the major search engines have submission forms and state that no site will be penalized for using them, most SEO experts agree that getting links is the better approach.

- Be creative in incorporating keywords. The search engines see a "." a "," and a "-" as a space. Use this to your advantage when writing copy using keyword phrases. For example, if you were optimizing for the term "picture frames" one way to incorporate that phrase into your copy would be to write- "Come to use when you want to do something special with your favorite picture. Frames are available in a variety of different sizes and colors." See how that works?

- Update your content frequently. Search engines keep track of the iterations of your website that are stored in the search indexes. New, fresh content will show the search engine that you care about the relevancy of your content. This is one of the reasons that blogs are appearing at the top of the search engine results. They tend to be updated much more frequently than most static websites.

- Don't worry, the search engines will find all of the copy on your page. One of the many SEO fallacies is that you have to include "optimized" copy at specific points on your page in order to rank well. The truth is that the search engine spiders will look at all of the content on your page no matter where it is. So don't waste time trying to build your pages in a certain order because you think it will help your rankings. That time is better spent adding content to your site to make it the best it can be!

- Avoid using image maps for navigation. Due to the code that makes up an image map search engines often get trapped in them and can't spider your site. If you use image maps for your main site navigation you should consider switching to standard HTML hyperlinks or your site will most likely not be spidered properly. If you want to keep the image maps you can, but you should add another navigation scheme to your site that uses only standard text HTML hyperlinks. An easy way to do this is to create a site map page that links to link to every page on your site. Then add a standard HTML link on each page of your site that links to the site map.

Take a few minutes to think about how the tips above can help you to increase the value of your website to potential customers. For one thing, when you implement these simple techniques your site will almost immediately become more visible to the search engines. Best of all, there is no cost for this optimization other than a bit of your time.