Having worked online as a Web marketer since 2005, I’ve seen just about every trick and gimmick imaginable for improving a page’s standing in the search engines. Naturally most of these suggested tactics are unethical, and therefore end up contributing to the creation of new strictures within the search algorithms.

The ironic thing is, you really don’t need any trickery to get the search engines to like you. All this black hat nonsense is just a big waste of time and it ends up causing more problems than it solves.

The pattern works as follows:

Every couple of months a new set of childish tactics is hailed as the next big thing for faking out the search algorithms and getting a page to the top of the rankings. Thousands of marketers who either don’t know any better or just aren’t capable of quality Web development climb on the bandwagon and for a couple of months all participants enjoy improved search engine position.

Invariably, the minds behind the Web’s leading search engines catch on to the hoodwinking, adjust their algorithms and level severe penalties against Webmasters caught using the most recent black hat techniques. Sometimes this will result in a domain being chucked completely out of the search index.

This is especially tragic when otherwise honest site owners have been given bad advice from so-called SEO experts. Generally speaking, there is no process for appeal once your site has been banned from Google or otherwise flagged as a black hat operation.

The good news is you need not worry about this sort of trouble if you simply resolve to steer clear of all suspect SEO strategies. Be sure to do your research and check in with the Web’s more reputable search marketing authorities before executing a new technique.

It’s really not hard to spot a black hat trick. Your gut will tell you if the method is questionable, and again if it’s above the radar you’ll certainly find info about it on any number of honest marketing blogs.

To help you avoid some of the guesswork, I’m going to give you some standard advice on what makes a good, search engine friendly piece of Web property. These rules of thumb haven’t changed since 2003 and it’s unlikely they’ll stop working any time in the future.

First, you need to understand that search engines are looking for exactly the same thing on a page that a human user is looking for: quality! Keep this in mind as you build your pages and set up your blogs and you can’t go wrong.

The most important onsite element for good SEO is your title tag. This needs to include one to three solid keyword phrases. Your title is not only crucial to feeding the search spiders, it’s also the heading that will be displayed when your site appears in the search results.

Next is your META description tag. There is some controversy as to whether the major engines still look at this tag, but I’m telling you right now Google does. Not only will a good application of your main keywords help your ranking, you should know the META description is the text that shows up beneath your title in the results listings.

Within your main page content, be sure to exercise good keyword placement with your H1, H2, and other heading tags. Also experiment with putting relevant keyword phrases into strong, italic, and underline tags to let spiders know where important terms are on your page.

And don’t forget to name your images, links, and other files as keyword phrases. This little-used tactic allows you to slip a few extra keywords into a page without stuffing your content.

When using a blog, be absolutely sure to insert several relevant tags into the appropriate field with all your posts. This function is incredibly effective at getting the attention of the search engines and can result in your posts being indexed literally within minutes.

It’s also a smart move to put together a simple site map. This is essentially a linkage index that allows the spider bots to crawl your entire site quickly and easily. There are a number of sitemap generators online that make this process quick and easy for you.

Taking the above tips into consideration, remember to keep it natural! If you go to absurd lengths to add excessive keywords into your page content you’ll be flagged as a search spammer and end up getting the dreaded slap for it.

If you apply this simple formula for building your pages, you’ll have search engine friendly Websites every time. The only thing left to do is acquire lots of quality back links and watch your ranking improve over time.

Tim Whiston is a professional entrepreneur who enjoys helping other entrepreneurs achieve success. He would love to teach you the basics of Web design with his comprehensive Website Creation Course.
 

One of the easiest ways to create your niche or authority site from the ground up is to use WordPress blogging software as your base. The software installs in five minutes (or less!) and you can easily tweak the base blog in a variety of ways.

NOTE: I’m talking about using WordPress as the foundation for your entire Website. So instead of installing a blog at yourdomain.com/blog the blog software would be the base template and content management system for your whole domain.

You can download WordPress here and follow the easy instructions for installation, or if you are using a Cpanel host you can just look for the Fantastico icon below on your main control panel dashboard:

Fantastico literally allows you to install WordPress (and many other super cool scripts and programs) by filling in a quick form and clicking a few buttons!

The cool thing is, nobody else has to know you’re using WordPress as your template engine. You can easily tweak WordPress so that it doesn’t look anything like a blog, and appears to visitors just like a well-designed content site.

There are literally hundreds of blog themes (template styles) to choose from, and any of these can be modified with just a little bit of work. More people are moving in this direction not only for the speed and convenience, but also because WordPress themes are extremely search engine friendly.

And because WordPress software includes an automatic RSS submission utility, every time you update your content you can instantly create hundreds of new backlinks for your site!

I’ve been using this system a lot recently. It’s a killer way to crank out a quality niche site in short order.

I just install the blog software, apply my standard tweaks which I have saved into a Word doc named Blog Install Notes, and then switch out the header graphic with one I build or have my head designer build for me. This quick method allows me to get down to the business of working my marketing plan right away, because instead of spending days putting my site together it’s done in a couple of hours (or less!).

Want an example? No problem.

I recently discovered a very lucrative niche within the prepaid wireless phone market. I found a prepaid cell phone company called Net 10 and did a little research on them.

It quickly became clear this operation was going to be king of the mountain in terms of prepaid wireless over the next couple of years, so I became an affiliate and set up my own Net 10 Phones portal within a single work session.

As you can see the site is clean, attractive, and set up in a way that is very consumer friendly. It is now at the top of the search results for multiple great keywords and creates passive revenue for my business on a daily basis.

I believe the fact that I used a WordPress base here not only made the development phase faster, but also helped with my SEO. The site was at the top of Google within the first week!

I strongly recommend this tactic to all my students and readers.

Once you get the software installed you just need to decide on the layout of your template and make the changes in your WordPress admin area. You should also select some good plugins to optimize your new site.

I suggest putting a Word or text doc together with all the tweaks and plugins you use for your first site of this nature. This document will be your reference sheet for future WordPress sites and will make the process much faster; with practice you’ll be able to set up a totally optimized WordPress base within minutes!

Give this a shot and let me know how it works for you.

Search engines are a source of extremely targeted traffic, and therefore all Website owners should be interested in basic search engine optimization. People come online looking for information and for solutions to their problems, and they usually start with a Google, Yahoo, or similar search.

Many slick talking sales reps will try to convince you that you need to invest in expensive services to get good rank within the search engines, but this simply is not true. All you really need is a grasp of some good basic fundamentals.

Armed with the proper knowledge, you can outsource the actual work involved with good SEO (search engine optimization) for only a small monetary investment. Here are a couple of good resources to help you acquire the knowledge you need for a strong search marketing effort:

Check out my basic seo article on another blog.

Also my Website Creation Course gives you a complete walkthrough of how to build search engine friendly Web pages.