The target for SEO continues to evolve, techniques that once worked, now are less effective. Social bookmarking is a new form of promotion that is becoming more important. If you know the basics of good SEO, then you can promote your site without becoming an expert in SEO. So, if you are looking to start "doing it yourself" keep these points in mind as you develop your plan.

1.Unique Search Engine-Friendly Content

One of the most important aspects is your unique web content that is laid out in a search engine friendly way. Search engines don't read Flash, or visit on www.the20seotools.com the text embedded in images. Use alt image tags with your most important keywords on the site for your images. Use these important keywords in your titles, headings and links to highlight them. Use your keywords as anchor text in links rather than using images. Never try to stuff keywords on your site by making them too small to read, or making it the same color as the background. Instead use your SEO keywords frequently in the page copy, but keep it to 3-5% on the page.

After you have created your copy, find out if it is getting crawled by the search engines. On Google enter "site:://www.sitemap-makers.com" to verify if your page has been indexed. Brand new sites may take some time to get indexed by the major search engines. There are many factors that play into being indexed including age of the site, duplicate content (copy and pasting content, or cookie cutter affiliate websites), Java script rather than HTML links, bad site layout (too many sub-directories),long dynamic URL's with special characters (question marks or any other database characters, #, &, *, !, %) known as "spider traps," or orphaned pages.

2. Do Your Keywords Homework Thoroughly

Keyword research is the most important step in the process. If you get this wrong you could be wasting all of your time and effort promoting your site. In your research start with very broad terms that describe your product or service. Narrow the terms and find alternate terms by using one of the keyword research services. I like to use Google AdWords, Keyword Discovery, and Wordtracker.

The goal would be to find highly searched keyword phrases and to optimize your site like the top sites in that keyword do. If a keyword is not popular, then it will not draw very much traffic. Remember to use the most focused keywords to optimize; because, it is much harder to gain rank with a general term and the traffic generated will be less targeted.

3. Get In-bound Links to Your Site

There are many ways to get links to your site, some traditional and others not so traditional. This is very important for SEO and PageRank, even though it may be intimidating at first. Google counts a link as a "vote" for your website when calculating PageRank. The more links you have, the more votes you have, and the higher your PageRank. Not all votes are created equal, a link from a higher ranking site will count more than a lower ranking site, sort of like a popularity contest.