There is one key skill that is often overlooked in the quest for higher search engine rankings. Yet almost everyone who uses the web will at least have heard of it. Good Web Designers use it every day and real SEO experts use it too. So what is this skill? Lets see what the well known and respected SEO Expert Jim Westergren has to say about it. Recently he listed what he sees as the essential skills that any SEO expert or good Internet Marketeer needs to know. Top of that list was HTML:

"As an SEO, knowing HTML is a must. You need to see and understand how the search engines are reading the source code of the web pages."

Its an excellent and often overlooked point - hence the little known secret! If you know HTML (which is easy to learn) you can really get under the skin of any web page and start to see how the search engine reads the page. So it seems that a little time spent brushing up on your html skills will be time well spent.

You can use your updated or new knowledge of html to design or alter your pages so that the search engines can read through them easier. If you stop to think about it for a moment you will see that this makes perfect sense. I mean who likes a hard read! I remember having to study Dicken's classic book "Hard Times" during my school days and boy that was a hard read. It wasen't just the subject matter but also the tiny font and the immense word density of the pages.

In order to put this key skill into practice you don't have to be a profesional code wrangler but you must at least know how a web page is structured, what the main tags are, and how they effect the readability of the page. With this knowledge you can take your current SEO skills to the next level and fine tune your pages for even more exposure.

So the Secret SEO Weapon is not so secret afterall. Yet my guess is that many internet marketeers and many self proclaimed SEO experts have probably overlooked this simple and yet essential skill. So be good to your search engine robot friends amd make it easy for them to read your pages. I am sure they will thank you for it by promoting your pages up the search engine rankings.