Top ten tricks to great Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not an exact science.  The major search engines unfortunately do not reveal their indexing and page ranking algorithms.  Below are ten SEO tricks that will put you ahead of the other sites.

1. Keep your HTML simple
   Search Engines are looking for content. If they have to sift through large amounts of nested tags and java script, they will be less likely to see your page as "content-rich". Try to avoid using design view of your HTML editor as it often adds large amounts of unnecessary markup to your pages. If you are serious about search engine optimization, you may want to take a crash course in HTML. If you know a few basic concepts of HTML, you will be able to omit out any unnecessary markup on the page. Also learn how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a powerful presentational technology that allows you to modify the look and feel of your site without adding large amounts of HTML.
2. Page titles - don't just show the name of your website
   Page titles serve two purposes, they let the user know what the topic of the page is, and more importantly for you, they provide search engines with important keywords indicating the content of your page. Put important keywords in the first one or two words of the page title. Keep the page title short - ten to twelve words. Try to form a sentence, instead of listing keywords separated by commas.
3. Don't waste your time on keyword and description meta-tags.
   Not to say these tags aren't important, but our most popular search engine, Google, doesn't pay any attention to the keywords meta tag, and most often chooses it's own description based on your content. Other search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN may find value in the keywords and description. Make sure they are descriptive of the content, but don't spend much time optimizing them.
4. Fill your pages with content
   Search engines love content. Fill your pages, especially the home page with meaningful, relevant content. Don't try to fool search engines by listing hundreds of keywords and hiding them in the background color of the page.  It has been mentioned that search engines can identify this tactic and frown on it.
5. Use alt and title attributes
   An image means very little to a search engine. Give your image a description using the alt and title attributes of the image tag.
6. Use search engine friendly URLs
   This is very important if you plan to add content management capabilities to your website. Many content management systems store page content in a database and access it through a "controller page". This controller page uses the URL query string to identify pages.  For example: http://www.webpage.com/controllerpage.cfm?pageid=products. While rumor has it that search engines are becoming wise to this type of URL, at present, it is not recommended.  Find a content management system that offers search engine friendly URLs, such as Plone.
7. Name your images appropriately
   Give your image a filename that makes sense. For example, christmas_ornament.gif is far more descriptive than image1.gif. Google Image Search will not have a problem locating your images if they are named appropriately. Let's remember, Google Image Search still brings people to your website.
8. Use heading tags properly
   H1 and H2 tags indicate topic and subtopic information. These tags stand out for search engines. Make sure each page has at least one H1 tag describing the page content.
9. Submit your URL
   If you have just put up a new website, search engines will not know how to find it yet. It will take time before other websites link to yours, which will bring the search engines to your site. Until that time, submit your URL to a few search engines to let them know you exist. Google, Yahoo, MSN.
10. Conform to standards
    If you don't know XHTML 1.1 or XHTML 2.0, learn them. Conforming to these XHTML standards may not necessarily increase your page rank, but it will force you to create simple, clean HTML which is easy for search engines to parse.