Read the top tips, then follow the explanations below for an understanding into the reasoning behind them.  Information like this isn’t everywhere on the web:

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year.

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year.

Stop using keywords in your URLs.

Stop using keywords in your titles.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page).

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week.  Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone.

Get a text editor like Notepad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less.

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site.  Put it into every forum profile you have created.

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts. Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – The Explanations

Change is the only constant you can count on in search engine optimization.  Although we often say that the fundamental principles of search engine optimization don’t change, pretty much everything else does.  If you want to be really, really good at this, you cannot be inflexible.  You cannot afford the luxury of becoming emotionally bonded to any particular idea.

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year. Why? Because you’ll find things you broke the last time around and you’ll be able to fix them.  Because you’ll finally be able to tweak the optimization for pages you have known could do better but for which you never found the time to do anything.  Because you’ll have an opportunity to improve your visitor experience and make your presentation more competitive (but avoid the “Web X.0 pitfall” — don’t marry your site to any particular concept).

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week. Why? Because it gives you opportunities to expand your search visibility. Because it gives you opportunities for more free links that actually help. Because it gives you opportunities to try out new ideas.  Because it increases the value of your Web site.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year. Why? Because obviously those titles weren’t helping your least successful pages.

Stop using keywords in your URLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page.

Stop using keywords in your titles. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a Web page without stuffing your title, then you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. Titles and URLs are options, not requirements, in search engine optimization. Learn to understand and fully appreciate the difference between being able to do something and needing to do something.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question. Why? Because looking at someone else’s mistakes and brilliant ideas with an unemotional, critical, helpful point of view will only help improve your own self-analysis.  Keep your ideas and opinions to yourself.  Just share your feedback on how other people’s sites look.  You’ll learn more faster by helping with your honest, gut-level reactions than by helping forum idiots attack people whose ideas they don’t agree with.  You’ll also look more professional, too.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month. Why?  So you have all your favorite advice in one easy-to-read-and-search compendium.  Don’t sell it.  Just use it.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step. Why? Because after a year of using all the advice you put in the previous one you’ll have a far better idea of just how much crap and bullshit you’re getting from SEO blogs and forums.  But that also means your next SEO book will be ten times better than the last.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page). Why?  You can’t do better than to nail the number 1 position for a query, so why not aim for a second query?  If you can optimize a page forwards and backwards, you should be able to handle just about anything.

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional. Why?  It teaches you just how hard it is to build a good community, and maybe you’ll appreciate what “good community” really means before you act like an ass in an SEO forum or blog and flame someone else for disagreeing with you.  But there is another reason.  Keep reading to see if you can find it in the explanations given below.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you can never write too many advertisements. Your audience is always changing. Your venues are always changing. And GOOD ad copy (not the cheap, shlocky crap you see most of the time) makes GREAT meta description tags.  BTW — you should write that ad copy for sites other than your own until you learn to stop using cheap, shlocky crap expressions like “Proudly announces”, “pleased to admit”, “best prices”, etc. Be informative. Be compelling. Be classy.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week. Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you should spend some time promoting your site while you learn how to become a better search optimizer. Besides, practice makes perfect.

Get a text editor like Wordpad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch. Why? Because when you’ve seen just how stupid your templated CSS code really is, you’ll begin to understand why ugly works better than pretty.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less. Why? Because you should never write a press release that starts out with, “John Shlock Smith the Shmuck proudly announces….”

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site. Why? Because it’s an opportunity for you to create an honest, sincere resource that no one else on the Web has the ability to create. Because people are actually more interested in your opinion of OTHER people’s Web sites than your opinion of your own Web sites.   Because if you haven’t found 20 sites you wish you had created that no one else has talked about in your regular Web communities, you need to spend less time with your buds and more time with the rest of the Web.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site. Put it into every forum profile you have created. Why? Because it makes you look confident, professional, and less like a shlocky self-promotional shmuck who doesn’t know what forums are for.  More importantly, it will teach you to write compelling content (think of those 25-word advertisements I mentioned above).

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site. Why? Because you’ll never compete with anyone harder to beat than yourself.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics. Why?  Because you need to know what it takes to become an influencer without cheating through social media Web site spam.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site. Why?  Because I’ve had to suffer through the frustration of not being able to take the computer away from someone who wants to do it their own way. Misery loves company.  Besides, it teaches us to be humble and appreciate the people who at least listen half the time.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts.  Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months. Why?  Because you need a competitive advantage that you cannot possibly get from using someone’s backlink checking tool.  Because you need to understand and appreciate that there is more to the Web than links. Because you need to be one step ahead of the other guy, who may very well have his own metrics in place before you even get started.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – What They Mean:

Let the idiots spend their days arguing in the SEO blogs and forums. They don’t need your help to look stupid.

You can learn from other people by watching them, helping them, promoting their sites, and putting the community ahead of yourself.  They won’t always appreciate what you do.  But you can knock a self-promotional shmuck out of the search results any day of the week if you know more about search engine optimization than he does.

You have to keep moving forward. When you stop learning about search engine optimization the idea of getting back into the game becomes overwhelming. Worse, if you become dependent upon any one tip or technique, you hobble yourself in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

Thanks to Michael Martinez for posting this on www.seo-theory.com

Also known as ‘Spiders’, ‘Crawlers’ and the ‘Googlebot’, these programs scrawl the internet constantly, from page-to-page, site-to-site, reading the content on the page and reporting back to Google and other search engines about what your site is about and what keyword or phrases would be relevant to display your site in it’s results.

Every day hundreds of them go out and scour the web, whether it’s Google trying to index the entire web, or a spam bot collecting any email address it could find for less than honorable intentions.  As site owners, what little control we have over what robots are allowed to do when they visit our sites exist in a magical little file called “robots.txt.”

“Robots.txt” is a regular text file that through its name, has special meaning to the majority of “honorable” robots on the web. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it’s both meaningless to you and a waste of your site’s bandwidth. “Robots.txt” lets you tell Google just that.

For my readership (because I love each and every one of you), I have included below a generator to create a robot.txt file to upload and use on your own sites:

Robots.txt Generator Tool © SEO Chat™       Allowed User Agent Select user agent or use default for all agents All AgentsAlexa AgentAltaVista AgentAOL Netfind/Excite AgentGoogle AgentHotBot AgentInfoSeek AgentLycos AgentMSN Search CrawlerNorthern Lights AgentWebcrawler Agent Enable All Webpages Yes No – Exclude These URL’s: ¦lt;br /> Enter URLs you wish to exclude /cgi-bin/<br /> /images/ Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

1) Create a website business plan that integrates nicely with your overall marketing objectives; the content should be consistent with any offline materials (leaflets, posters, business cards), the graphics/images should be web friendly and consistent with your overall branding; same colours, fonts, basically, everything that makes your website ‘recognisable’ as a brand.

2) When creating a website, try not to get “geek crazy” – meaning you become so in love with the latest design technology, your web site gets bogged down with heavy graphics, add-on software and components, GIF animated image/tacky crap, etc. But, conversely, check your ego at the door when you work at your design. There are too many sites cramped with meaningless junk they literally turn visitors away.  A decent, clean design is what you typically need.  Keep it ‘fresh’.

3) Pay attention to your website’s “load times,” i,e. how long it takes a web site to load on the worst-case scenario: a 56 kbps modem (this is an industry average and some users will still be using this – even in today’s broadband world).  If its more than 12-18 seconds, you may experience the “click of death” – the site doesn’t load quickly and the surfer is gone… forever.   Of course if you are targeting broadband customers who are reaching your site via ISDN, DSL or Cable modem then you can build a website that incorporates multimedia-ready content that may include streaming audio or video, Shockwave or Flash capabilities.

4) Keep it simple – make a website easy to navigate, build an efficient menu structure that is consistent with industry standards.

5) Your visitors should be able to get to their desired area of your site within one or two mouse clicks; they will quickly get frustrated if they have to click around multiple menus to get to the page that they are seeking.

6) Develop content that is web-friendly.  People don’t read text on websites like they do in any other offline media. Keep paragraphs short ( no more than three or four sentences) and put in white space between your content, include links in your pages as well to other areas of your site as well.  this not only steers people across your site, but also helps with seo.

7) Make your site User-friendly.   Don’t use white backgrounds with yellow text, don’t have tiny, tiny writing.  This page is about the limit (I personally love this size, but the majority of people don’t).  Also bear in mind people who are colour-blind or visually impaired – can they still use your site efficiently?   Will they be able to actually see anything on your site?

8. Optimise your website for Search Engines by researching about 8-12 keywords that people will use to find your site from Google etc, then incorporate these keywords actually within your site content (to drive relevancy with search engine spiders/bots) and then get lots of links to your site (also known as ‘backlinks’.  It is estimated as much as 70% of all traffic to most web site comes through a search engine of some sort – mainly Google, Yahoo and Aol.

9) Check  into your log server files regularly to uncover “tracking” made through your website – your log files are raw data that show how and from, where people located  your website, where they went within your web site, how long they stayed there for, etc.  There are many products on the market that can achieve such purpose, such as Google Analytics.   With Google, you would simply sign up with Google for free, they then give you some god to add into the pages and it does all the reportig for you.

10) Think global, not local - in your overall site design.  Always think that the greatest Internet growth is occurring outside where you live, so it is essential to build a site that can be accessed easily by people anywhere around the world – assuming that the content can be useful for anyone.   You may also want to make your web site content readily available in diverse languages as well (especially if e-commerce), so your website can be utilized by all.

Hope you find this as useful as I did.   It may seem common sense, but it’s easy to forget one or more of the important factors.

Now the first few sites I designed were pretty shabby looking in retrospect, but not a bad start either (like www.evo-power.net), but that website alone helped me loads and gave me a firm understanding of how design works, google adsense, forum building and embedding media like video in the web pages.  

All this is all very well, but the very basic concept to get a grasp on is the site’s layout.  Layout plays an integral part in the look and feel of the site.   Users need a good layout which makes it easier to navigate, easier to read the whole page and is making use of all space (not leaving any white spaces empty).  Once you have a decent layout, the rest is just filling it.  It’s the framework and skeleton and typically forms the basis of the template your site will adopt. 

Designing a website requires that you are pretty familiar with basic website layout and structure.  After all,  a website is (in effect) a folder or directory containing files (web pages, images, scripts) and other folders.  Website layout is about creating a structure for these folders and files and how they are linked together.  The more websites you build, the more creative you will become and effectively be able to push more boundaries.  It sometimes takes a lot of adjustment to get it right, and can be a pain playing around with css stylesheets to align columns and <divs>, but like everything – practice makes perfect.

Although the actual layout of a website varies considerably depending on size, they all follow the same basic principles. Websites consist generally of three types of Web pages – the home page (index), Intermediate pages and content pages.

The homepage is the starting page of the Website and acts as the site guide.  It is the page presented to site visitors who do not specify a web page and will give them the first impression of who you are and what you do.

For small to medium-sized Websites, the layout will generally be two tier ( no intermediate layer) and with larger websites ( +25 pages) having the three tier layout.  The pages are ‘linked’ together in any order, but remember - some general design rules should be applied here:

• All pages should link back to the home page – usually the logo on top left of site should do the same.

• Website navigation is vital – for most websites, this consists of a navigation menu/bar at either the top, side or bottom with many having several navigation options.  It is always a good idea to use plain text navigation menus when possible as it makes it easier for search engines.  Recommended minimum menu options are:

• Home page - starting page
• Contact – your contact details usually minimum email address
• Site map————List of the important web pages
• Links – Links to other sites and useful resources.
• About Us – Your company profile with background or history

The home page menu option should not be included on the home page itself – or at least ‘unclickable’ i.e not a link.

• Any page should be a maximum of two clicks away i.e. 2 links.  Don’t have users click 4 or 5 pages to get to your ‘pricing page’ for example.

• Try not to have more than 20 links per page.   Too many links looks cluttered and confusing.

• Web Page names should be descriptive and contain keywords. 

• Links to Internal pages should obey normal linking practise and have descriptive anchor text. I.e. keywords should be used in the link name.

• Every page should have at least one other page pointing to it (i.e an ‘incoming’ link).  Don’t have pages with no links to them (obvious – but not always followed).

• A link to a sitemap should be included on each page so as to aid user navigation and make indexing by search engines easier.  A sitemap is just a page which has every page on your site linked.  See my OwenDevelopment sitemap page here. 

• A link to a contact page should be included on each page so users can always get in touch.

Using Folders or directories

Web pages can contain text, pictures, audio, video and scripts. Generally almost all web pages contain text and graphics, many also contain scripts. It is normal site design to divide the Website into different folders on the hosting server.  The scripts and graphics have their own folders and the content pages are directly under the root folder normally.  This isn’t a neccessity, but makes life easier.

 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)  and JavaScript

If you use Cascading Style Sheets and/or JavaScript  then always use external ones were possible. Using external ones makes them easier to change as only one page needs to be edited to effect the entire website and it is also much better for the search engines.  The CSS sheet holds all the information such as text size, image borders, column widths, colours and more.

Once you have these basic layouts sorted, each page should be the same layout to keep consistency and will help users navigate effectively.  I also advise to check out your competition to see an understanding of the colours they use, the layouts they use and make improvements on all the above.