Once people have found your fantastic website, they most important things a Webmaster should be on top of is the status of their links, both internal and external. Links are, in many ways, the "killer app" that allows the Internet to exist. Why are they so important to SEP? External links from high-quality, well-traveled sites spread the word that your site is of high quality and deserves to be well traveled. Internal links indicate user friendliness. Search technology, such as Google's actually rates a site by the number and quality of the links pointing to it. This is not to say that hundreds of links from lesser known sources will not carry equal or greater value. Google was the first search engine to use link popularity to rank results, and others have followed suit



Google looks for content on the actual viewable page. This means that a keyword META tag, do little to help your optimization and may, in fact, hurt you by showing up as spam. Google reduces your chances for rankings on a keyword every time you repeat the word. Therefore, make sure that the page you are optimizing for a particular keyword actually talks about that word and doesn't simply use the word in META tags. The Title tag and description in your META tags are important for determining your placement. If you do not provide a description in your META tags, Google will scan your page and create one on your behalf. This poses two problems: Google's description may not contain any of the keywords your are trying to attain rankings on, and the description will point out the discrepancies between what you are targeting with META tags and what the page actually talks about.

For example, if you have a page about dog food, the content of the page should be about dog food, which certainly encompass dog food, but also could include cat food, bird food, rabbit food, fish food, and many other types of "pet food." The desire listing under "dog food" would be unlikely if the summary of the page pertains to "pet food."

Although Google claims not to consider other META tags, such as the Title or keyword tags, for its relevancy rating, it does appear to place pages which have the search term in the Title tag in more prominent positions. Additionally, it appears that Google may rank a page higher if there is a link on the page that contains a keyword. Using the keyword in a header tag also helps draw attention to it. However, there is never any substitute for having meaningful content on your pages.

Building informational pages for Google is a good way to increase the number of pages that get indexed. These informational pages should have a separate domain registered from them as Google is only likely to index approximately 25 pages of the default or index.htm page. Also, a separate domain will allow you to place keywords in the URL. Google gives higher rankings to pages that contain the keyword in the URL. For example, the domain name http://www.auto-parts.com will help you attain a ranking on the phrase "auto parts."

Finally, Google makes it known that it prefers not to index pages that are low in content, so make your informational pages content-rich and relevant. In Google's view, there is nothing better you can do than provide real content that will solve searcers' problems.