Keeping SEO in mind when you design your site can make it much easier for you to get a good page rank and more traffic from day one.

Reciprocal Linking:

Reciprocal Links can be a good friend to the web master. By exchanging links with other webmasters you can get many websites to keep a link to your web site on their web sites and in return you have to put a link to their site on your web site. When the search engine indexes you site it looks and all the links on your site and it marks them on a list. The sites with more links to them are considered more important then sites with lower links back to them. Some webmasters have more then one website and what they do is put links on all of their sites to all the different pages of their other sites to make the sites seem like they have more links, this is called link farming.

Thanks to those who would rather use what is known as "Black Hat" marketing techniques we can no longer open our emails without having to delete all the emails fro cheap pharmaceuticals and unsolicited stock tips, but it does not stop there. Now you have to worry when you do a web search that you may get to a spam site and not a site related to what you are searching for. Webmasters are now making sites with the purpose of bringing in traffic. When you go to the site all you find is some text that usually makes no sense at all and dozens of links and banner ads. These sites make money every time someone clicks one of those links. The site itself has no other purpose then to hold the links.

Content:

The content of your site is very important. You need to make sure that not only is it relevant to the topic of your site, but that it is interesting or informative to your readers/customers. If you do not change the content on your site and add items regularly you will find that people will stop visiting your site. Lets say you have a travel website and you do not update it often you may still be advertising summer vacations in the winter and will not be making as many winter vacations sales as you should be.

Page Rank:

Did you ever wonder how a site gets its page rank? Each search engine does it a bit different but the basics are the same. They have a rating system and once a month they check every website on the internet and the sites get put thru this rating process. They check things like ease of use, popularity, content changes since the last time it was checked and they come up with a number and that becomes your page ranking.

Ease of Use:

It is important to keep in mind when making the site that it needs to be easy to get from one page to another, and that everything is in a logical order to make things easy to find next time. How well the site is designed is a factor in your ranking.

These tips can give any webmaster a good start when designing a new website, and should help increase traffic on existing sites.