“Search Engine Optimization” or more often referred to as SEO is a requirement if you want your business to be found by the leading search engines such Yahoo! and Google.  No matter how good your website is, if it cannot be found by your prospective clients, then nothing will be achieved nor gained.  I hope this article can give you several helpful tips on SEO.

1.    Develop fresh and exceptional articles on a regular basis.  Having something new and relevant information on your site regularly will cause people to visit your site regularly as they look forward to getting new things from your site.
2.    Do not employ flash fully in your site.  Search engines cannot readily translate flash. Needless to say, if your site is flash-based, then it will remain unknown as far as the search engines are concerned.  Flash keeps your website look dynamic but users go to a site to find a need which the content will have to tell them.  Most of them are pressed for time and would not even have the time to admire the site’s embellishments.

3.    Try your best to get back links.  One of the ways you can do this is by having a good content which can be appreciated by a lot of people and get them to visit your site.  If you can do this, then you are already halfway there.

4.     Keep in mind the alt tags.  This is especially true if your site generally employs photos.   Alt tags will be what the search engines will be able to read and base their ratings.

5.    Use the robots.txt all the time.  Although robots.txt files make it harder for search engines to read the site, you still have to utilize this because it identifies “duplicate content” which negatively affects page ranking.  Try utilizing the robots.txt on blogs to indicate the main pages, the pages which are used to preview the blog posts.

6.    Make use of videos to prolong your visitors’ stay on your site.  Generally visitors will stay on your site for a few minutes and will stay longer if they have to read some text-based data.  Another way of making them stay longer is to use videos to demonstrate the text-based information.  This is a surefire technique of which helps raise page ranking.

7.    Meta tags and the like may have no direct bearing on the improvement of your page rank. However, this will surely be a factor for SEO.  Meta descriptions emerge in the search engines.  Having a description will make it easier for people to know what the site is about and the more they click on your site, the more opportunities for backlinks.

8.    Do not digress from the set web norms.  These set web standards has been designed to facilitate accessibility which will determine the real value of a website.  Keep the following in mind:
A. always provide a DOCTYPE, particularly the XHTML type.

B. all tags should be closed

C. never utilize tables or borders in your layout

D.    instead of using in-line CSS; make us of external style sheets.

9.  Make a summary of your contents, links and other metadata (RSS feeds).  You do
have to indicate your whole article, just a summary plus a link to your article.  For lack of time, a lot of surfers will go to a site and just look at the RSS feed which sometimes reduces the appreciation for the whole site.