10 ways to be a great SEO

Despite the fact that SEO can make or break a business online, SEO still conjures up a lot of negativity.

Some of the negativity is fair. While there are plenty of legitimate SEOs, the market still has its fair share of snake oil salesman going from client to client in a hit-and-run fashion promising the world but delivering none of it.
The negativity and controversy that exists around SEO can make the SEO market a tough place to do business. Here are 10 ways to be a great SEO and to demonstrate to your clients and prospective clients that you're committed to providing a legitimate, top-notch service.

• Don't guarantee results. No matter how skilled you are and no matter how good your track record is, it's impossible to guarantee results since there's so much that is out of your control, even if you do everything right. So instead of promising things you aren't able to promise, describe what you can do to put your client in a position to achieve results and how the things you've done in the past resulted in success for other clients.If you find yourself dealing with someone who is demanding guarantees, consider moving on since these situations rarely end well in my experience.
  
• Set expectations. Even though you can't guarantee top SERPs, you can help a client create realistic expectations. Whether it's giving the client timeframes for the tasks you'll be completing or explaining the process of SEO, it's important to be sure that the client knows what to expect.
• Educate. Some SEOs don't like to tell their clients what they're doing. They think of their knowledge as a trade secret and believe that if they educate the client, the client will eventually fire them and take over SEO themselves. This type of mentality is the hallmark of an amateur consultant. Most clients prefer transparency to secrecy and aren't interested in firing consultants performing services that don't fall under their core competencies. You should think of knowledge sharing as a way to demonstrate your competence to clients, making yourself even more valuable.
  
• Admit when you don't know something. SEO is a dynamic field and things are always changing. In many cases, hard and fast rules don't exist and there aren't any 'official' answers. So when a client asks you about something and you don't have an answer, don't make one up; say so and look into it.
• Keep your skills and knowledge up-to-date. Search engine algorithms are in a constant state of flux and the field of SEO is one of the most dynamic on the internet. Make sure you're staying on top of the latest developments since no client wants an SEO in 2009 who has 2005 skills and knowledge.
• Define deliverables. Last week I wrote that SEO is a journey, not a destination. It's important for clients to understand that. If someone wants to hire you for a few weeks, there's a lot that you can deliver but there's also a lot that you can't deliver. Therefore I always recommend detailing what deliverables you can provide in the timeframe that the client gives you, being realistic about what this means to the client's overall SEO strategy.
• Don't push the limits. The line between white hat and black hat is often blurred and even if your risk tolerance is high, you shouldn't assume that a client's is too. Think of yourself as a doctor when working with clients and remember to 'do no harm'.
• Provide references. Even though some prospective clients won't ask for them, offering up references proactively is a good idea because it helps you stand out in a market that still has more than a few snake oil salesmen.
• Don't confuse SEO with PPC. Be careful about confusing organic SEO and paid search marketing. Yes, I've actually met people who didn't know the difference because their SEO 'experts' had led them to believe that the two were the same. Obviously that was probably a way of masking the fact that they were unable to deliver organic results.
• Remember that SEO is more than just Google. Even though Google deservedly receives most of the SEO attention because it has the marketshare in the major markets, good SEO is holistic and many of your clients might receive significant benefits from other search engines. Therefore don't exclude other search engines from your services.

WordPress SEO resources and tips

WordPress is a popular open-source blogging platform that has a powerful set of features and can be extended through the use of free plug-ins, of which there are thousands.
 
To maximize the usefulness of WordPress as a business tool, you should take advantage of every opportunity to optimize your blog for search engines.
WordPress Documentation

WordPress' Codex includes a page dedicated to SEO topics and this page is a must-read for anybody operating a WordPress blog.
This page includes important information about setting up SEO-friendly permalinks, maintaining a healthy Robots.txt file for search engines and making sure that you're taking advantage of feed submissions. It also links to websites with useful SEO information.
WordPress Plugins

There are a number of great plug-ins that make it easy to implement SEO techniques with WordPress.

All in One SEO Pack

The "All in One SEO Pack" is one of the most downloaded WordPress plug-ins and performs a number of functions, including optimizing your page titles, adding META tags automatically and removing common duplicate content.

Google XML Sitemaps

Another popular plug-in, Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap for your blog.

KB Robots.txt

This plug-in enables you to create and edit Robots.txt files from within the WordPress admin.

Redirection

Redirection helps you monitor 404 errors, automatically manage 301 redirections when a post URL changes and has a powerful set of features that helps you redirect users to different pages based on various conditions.

Breadcrumb NavXT

Add breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress blog with this plug-in.

WordPress Related Posts

This plug-in allows your blog to feature "related posts."

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images automatically adds the ALT and TITLE attributes to images.

Nofollow Case by Case

This plug-in enables you to decide which comments, pingbacks and trackbacks have or don't have the "nofollow" attribute which is otherwise automatically added by WordPress.

SEO strategy for new websites

Starting a new company is extremely hard, which is probably why most businesses fail within the first couple of years.
Challenges such as marketing and hiring the right staff are some of the major issues that even good managers struggle with.
Launching a new website is just as hard and, as if things weren't difficult enough, Google gives people an extra hurdle which is sometimes called the "sandbox".

When you launch a new site, Google doesn't trust it at all. Even if the BBC launched a new site it would start off without any trust and would receive very little traffic.
As the site attracts links from other sites, it gradually earns enough trust to start ranking for some long tail search terms.
If the site gains enough trusted links it may start to rank highly for competitive keywords (ie keywords with lots of PPC advertisers) but this can take up to 24 months.

You are probably thinking that this is a harsh move by Google, but with the sheer volume of sites being launched it needs to have some method of making sure only the really good ones reach the top.
Luckily you can follow a few simple tips to reach the top quicker.
1. Your first links
When you launch your brand new site the first few links can make all the difference. Linking to it from other trusted sites right out of the gate can dramatically shorten the time it takes to build trust. Conversely, starting a site off with low quality links is suicide.

Submit to a couple of trusted directories such as Business.com and the Yahoo! Directory and maybe link to the site from some of your other company's websites (link from the news sections to appear more natural).

2. Spin-off sites
Sometimes a new site is a spin-off from a particular section of an existing site. For example, a car insurance site might have a caravan insurance section but then decide to launch a dedicated caravan insurance website.
In this case, the best method would be to create the new site on the new domain and not allow Google to access it. Then once the site was ready you would 301 redirect the old pages to the new pages and hope that the rankings and trust from the old domain passed across.

3. Building trust
Most people try to get relevant links to their sites, which are great for improving rankings in a particular niche but not quite as good for building trust. The ideal links for building trust are from major blogs and news sites.
These can also be quite relevant as usually the article linking to you is related to your niche - even though the rest of the site isn't.

Sites that receive a lot of attention from the mainstream press almost always start ranking a lot more quickly than sites that don't have the benefit of a large PR budget.

Why you need to know PPC to be great at SEO

Andrew Girdwood wrote an article in April last year, which spoke about why to be great at PPC you have to be good at SEO.
There are some excellent tips here, which are well worth taking a look back over, but I believe this can be applied both ways.
Looking at this from the opposite perspective, I have listed some reasons why, in my opinion, having a strong understanding of the paid search advertising model can be a big advantage to improving SEO techniques.
Below are a few tips about how you can integrate PPC knowledge into your SEO strategy:

• Paid search helps you to understand the importance of click through rates (CTRs) because PPC managers will try to write concise and interesting PPC headlines to generate a maximum number of clicks.
  
  For SEO, you can look to integrate the top performing PPC ad headline ideas into webpage title tags; maximising CTRs for organic listings, while still using optimised keywords relevant to a specific search.
  
  
• In many cases, optimising a website’s homepage is the easy option for targeting the most important keywords. However, if this was a paid search campaign, you would not send users to a general webpage where the navigational options are high and where the user may not find what they have originally searched for, get confused and hit the back button.
  
  Instead, you would try and keep the bounce rate low by selecting a PPC landing page containing content related to a specific query. Shouldn’t you be doing the same for organic search traffic?
   
• Organic search snippets are commonly very bland and boring to read for users, but the main objective of a PPC ad is to be compellingso that it attracts a user’s eye and increases the number of clickthroughs.
  
  PPC descriptions can be very time-consuming to perfect, but once they are performing well they can easily be applied to freshen up meta descriptions and provide a more interesting listing in the SERP’s.
  
  You should also remember not only to use important keywords (so that these are highlighted when searched for), but also to clearly describe the landing page content so that the description attracts as many relevant clicks as possible where traffic is likely to be of a good quality and convert at a higher rate.
  
  This can be very effective when applied to webpage’s which are already generating significant volumes of search engine traffic.
   
• Landing page optimisation is often overlooked during an SEO project. However, it is possible to optimise a webpage effectively while still using many of the usability techniques you would apply to a PPC ad.
  
  This should create a clear navigational path to direct users towards the end goal of a converting sale or lead. Sometimes you may have to finely balance the importance of landing page, perhaps for example with a #6 ranking achieving a 5% conversion rate, compared to a less optimised #8 ranking with a 15% conversion rate.
  
  But the end goal should always be the quality of traffic, so optimising for conversions should always be a major consideration.
   
• Many website URLs are long, messy and often don’t contain targeted keywords. If you have a PPC display URL which is achieving high CTRs, try to incorporate this into your organic strategy to build a URL structure which is tidier for the search engine spiders and more attractive to click for a searcher.
  
  
• PPC is frequently seasonally-based. For example, in PPC you may heavily promote summer holidays during the early months of a New Year. Seasonality isn’t as common in SEO, but if you look at this with a PPC mindset you may try and optimise for seasonal keywords more heavily.
  
  Perhaps aiming to improve organic rankings for specific terms such as “Beach Holiday Destinations in 2009”, also targeting additional traffic from Google News and Universal Search results.
  
  If you already have high rankings for more competitive terms such as “summer holidays”, rather than creating new content on a separate URL you could update the previous version instead, maintaining rankings and providing users with more relevant and higher converting content.
   
• Actual PPC keyword data can be invaluable to an SEO campaign. While there are many very good keyword research tools available, few compare to actual search volume, impression data from Google AdWords.
  
  In addition to improving the accuracy of estimating search traffic, the clickthrough rate and conversion figures can be very useful towards selecting terms which are key to a business. Some keywords may not convert as highly as expected when put into practice, so testing these first using PPC means you can focus upon proven high-quality keywords, rather than basing selection on assumptions which may prove to be incorrect.
  
  This is especially important when you consider that it may take over 6 months to find this out while waiting for rankings to reach a high-traffic referring level.
  
  
• Many high converting PPC keywords are likely to be long tail variations which you may not have considered otherwise. When added to an SEO campaign, these are likely to be less competitive to obtain high organic rankings for and may quickly become a very profitable source of traffic.

Six design tips for better URLs

It’s an area that is overlooked on many websites, but URL design is an important consideration. Bad URLs may mean that you website won’t be found, visited, or submitted to sites like Digg.
Ideally, URLs should be short, readable, descriptive and memorable. Visitors to your site, other sites linking to yours, and of course the search engines will appreciate the care you have taken over your URL structure.
Here are a few tips for URL design…
Make URLs readable
If your URLs are readable and describe the content of the web page they lead to in some way, people will be more likely to click on them.
For example, this URL from VentureBeat is easy to understand: http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/17/google-to-buy-valve/, but this one from ClickZ is incomprehensible: http://blog.clickz.com/080916-122203.html. There are far worse ones out there too - for some reason, laws of nature and all that, the bigger the media brand the worse this seems to become (serial offenders include CNN, Reuters, MSNBC, etc).
Keep them short
A short URL is more likely to be remembered and is much easier for people to type it straight into the address bar on their browser.
Also, if you need to email a link to someone, a long longer than around 70 characters will not display well in many email clients. Easier said than done, in many cases (it can be tricky for publishers).
Make them permanent
People bookmark webpages on their browsers, or on social sites like Digg, and Delicious so, once you have published a web page, don't alter the URL as users clicking these bookmarked links will just encounter an error.
Make them guessable
If your URL structure makes sense, then people will be able to guess and navigate around a site by editing the URL. For example, if you are on this page: http://econsultancy.com/blog, then you know that, by removing the 'blog' part you can get back to the homepage, or add another term, such as research to reach that section of the site.
Use keywords in URLs
Having keywords in URLs can be useful for search engines, as well as making them more readable. This is something that Google has advised in the past.
Another reason for including keywords is that, as the URL will be displayed under the page title and extract in search results page, this information may be used by people considering whether to click on a link.
Avoid session IDs
As different URLs are generated for different human visitors,  Session IDs cause search robots problems. As a result many search robots have a rule that they don’t crawl these pages since there are many different pages addresses for different sessions.
Websites that have registration processes, or wish to track user activity will often use session IDs; an alternative is to use session cookies instead.

Google provides tips on duplicate content

Duplicate content is an important issue and something that can have an adverse effect on a website’s search engine rankings.
So lots of site owners will be pleased to hear that Google has provided some tips on how to address it.
According to Sven Naumann on Google's Webmaster Central Blog, there are two main types of duplicate content:
Duplicate content within one website
This is often unintentional and can be the result of sites having pages for similar products where the content has been only slightly changed, or because landing pages have been created for PPC campaigns.
In this case, Google recommends that webmasters include the preferred version of the URL on their sitemap file, which will help the search engine's crawlers find the best version.
Duplicate content across domains
This refers to content identical to that on your website appearing on third party domains, often when sites use scrapers to copy your text and use it to push themselves up the rankings.
Naumann claims that Google manages to determine the original source of the content "in most cases", and that having your content copied shouldn’t impact on your search rankings.
He offers the following tips if sites with scraped content are ranking higher than the original website:

• Make sure your site’s content is being crawled by Google.
  
  
• Check the Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
  
  
• Make sure your site is in line with Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Google's Matt Cutts' tips on SEO

Google software engineer Matt Cutts has summed up a site review session he did at the recent PubCon in Las Vegas.
In reviewing a few sites, he gives some insight into what site mistakes a webmaster should avoid, and gives some tips on improving a site’s search engine visibility.
Duplicate contentSome of the people whose sites were reviewed had a number of different domains, and the overlapping content and pages from the various sites can cause problems:

“We discussed the difficulty of adding value to feeds when you’re running lots of sites. One thing to do is to find ways to incorporate user feedback (forums, reviews, etc.).”
“The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection. If I can spot duplicate content in a minute with a search, Google has time to do more in-depth duplicate detection in its index.”

Organising contentOne of the sites Matt looked at contained hundreds of articles going back to 1996, and included a very messy sitemap page listing all the articles.

“So how should a webmaster make a sitemap on their site when they have hundreds of articles? My advice would be to break the sitemap up on your pages. Instead of hundreds of links all on one page, you could organize your articles chronologically (each year could be a page), alphabetically, or by topic.”

Having mulitple domains Some of the site’s owners had many different domains registered:

“My quick take is that if you’re running 50 or 100 domains yourself, you’re fundamentally different than the chiropractor with his one site: with that many domains, each domain doesn’t always get as much loving attention, and that can really show."
"Ask yourself how many domains you have, and if it’s so many that lots of domains end up a bit cookie-cutter-like.”

Reciprocal links
Matt spotted a few instances of sites swapping reciprocal links as a quick method of increase link popularity.

“When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that 1) it was immediately obvious to me, and therefore our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links, and 2) in the instances that I looked at, the reciprocal links weren’t doing any good."
"I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attract viral buzz or word of mouth. Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.”

Working words: How to write for SEO

I often fill these pages with rants about what not to do when writing copy for search engine optimisation (SEO) and for a web audience.
However, it struck me recently that I have not spent much time exploring best practice in SEO copywriting and how to ensure your content is as fit for purpose as possible.
I am going to remedy that today. Please comment if you have any questions or additions.
Spiders
Spiders are the crawlers sent out by search engines such as Google to trawl through the web, recording details and information about the pages they visit.
What they find determines how well you rank for the words and terms within your site. So, what can you do to help?
1) Choose your keywords and phrases and stay conscious of them to ensure they appear whenever naturally possible within the website's text.
2) Spiders pay more attention to bold and italic words, so when you use such formatting, try to make sure it is a keyword or phrase.
3) They read left to right, so place your keywords as early as possible in the text.
4) Spiders consider headlines and sub headings to be particularly important, so make sure they are as relevant as possible and, if natural and readable, contain your keywords.
Humans
I am often amazed at how many people forget the real purpose of SEO. The motive is not to get to the top of the search engine results pages, not really. That is like saying the purpose of cooking is to heat meat, rather than eat it.
The idea is to gain greater visibility and traffic. That means all content on a page must be interesting to people. People, not search engines.
So, make your copy fun, interesting, relevant, grammatical. Everything a real person looks for when browsing the web. Also, try these tips:
1) Alliteration is good. Humans like alliterative phrasing and looking out for such opportunities allows the writer to concentrate on creating elegant copy rather than just functional words.
2) Use short sentences. The online reader is lazy. To help them read the page more easily, keep sentences short and try to limit paragraphs to just two or three lines.
3) Keep a sense of humour. Unless your pages cover genocide throughout history, there will be opportunities to make the odd joke. Seize these. The more personality you have on your site, the better.
4) Call to action. Your copy does not just exist for the reader to read, you are trying to secure business. While your content should not be one endless pitch, do not be afraid to include a call to action somewhere in it.
Linking out
There is a lot of confusion out there over links. Most people are happy with the basics: inbound links good, farmed links bad and so on, but some people worry that linking out from your content could devalue your site.
I believe there are three important points here.
1) If you are a human reading a website, outbound links to sources provide credibility and relevant further information. That makes you happy and gives you a positive impression of the page.
2) Should a search engine spider be looking at your content, outbound links to relevant pages are no problem, it will only get suspicious if you are linking out all the time and to irrelevant places.
This will devalue your site's importance to the search engines and, of course, too many links can make you look very suspicious.
3) If you want to link to a new pages, make sure a new window opens up. The last thing you want to be doing is directing people away from your site.
Linking in
Inbound links are brilliant; the more the better, particularly if you can receive them from high authority pages.
However, the main way to secure these links is to create impressive content that real people will want to link to.
This means good copywriting can result in good SEO. Rubbish and repetitive content may be cheaper or easier but it will not provide the long-term benefits you need.
Quality is everything
If you can't write, don't. If you can, then make sure you take the time to really hone your copy and make it as good as it can be.
Each time a company commits words to its pages, it is presenting itself to a potentially huge audience.
This might be the page that scores hugely in Digg or Sphinn and carries your firm's name around the world. Or, it might be that just one person sees it but he or she carries enormous buying power.
Make your words impress the search engines and the online community. Make your words work.

Tips on optimising your blog for SEO and readers

Jennifer Slegg at Search Engine Land has some useful tips on optimising your blog, for the benefit of both your readers and the search engines.
Jennifer presents some tips for increasing your visibility on search engines, others, including tips on fonts and descriptive titles, to make your blog more accessible and easy to read.
Here is a small selection of tips:
Make sure you have RSS available:

“Many hosted blogging solutions don’t have RSS automatically available, so you will need to add it. And when you do add it, ensure you have those RSS links in an obvious spot. Place all those handy subscribe links in your sidebar, which is exactly where people will look for them.”

Post regularly:

”The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot and other bots will stop by on a more regular basis. Google loves updated fresh sites, so it make sense to feed the bot what it wants.”

Watch out for Trackback & Comment Spam:

”You don’t want Google or Yahoo to find masses of spammy links on your site. Use one of the many tools on the market for your blog platform to manage both comment and trackback spam.”

Be Aware of Your Anchor Text:

”When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here”, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry.”

Tips on internal linking strategy

Internal linking is an important and often overlooked element of SEO and, unlike external links, the site owner has complete control over this, so it's crucial to make the most of it.
Scott Allen of Search Engine Guide has written a useful article on internal linking strategies. Here are a couple of his tips, alongside some from our SEO Best Practice Guide...
Link within your content
Scott advises webmasters to go through their site's content and work out where it would make sense to link to other pages which you want to rank better.
Make sure that the anchor text matches the keywords and phrases that you want the pages to rank well for. Scott also advises that these target keywords should appear on the destination page, as this will make the linking more effective.
Link from stronger pages
Some webpages may be more popular in the search rankings and receive more links than the rest of your website. You can strengthen these weaker pages by including some contextual links to them from the stronger pages.
Some additional tips from E-consultancy's SEO Guide...
Links from footers
This approach can also help with usability, as it is effectively a mini site map on every page. It also allows you to include some lengthy to be included.
For example, E-consultancy ranks well in Google for keyphrases such as 'web project management' and 'online surveys & research', both of which are included in the footer.
Sitemaps
Spending time on an effective sitemap is not only effective for SEO, but also has usability benefits.

• Always have a sitemap with text links, not images.
  
  
• Make sure your anchor text reflects user behaviour and keyphrase analysis, so include not just product names, but also the most popular keywords for that page.

Links from e-newsletters and blogs
Articles in newsletters and blogs are another source of internal links and, as they are often hosted on separate or sub-domains, they may provide additional value.
Include relevant anchor text in the links back to the main site, not just the title of the article.

50 SEO tips for online retailers

SEO for online retailers is the process of improving a website potential in order to gain more organic non-paid traffic from the major search engines. Normally, SEO uplift doesn't happen overnight and it can take a long while to rank well for non brand key terms. 

The rule of thumb is this: the more competition a relative term has, the harder you'll find it to rank for the term. With that said, you've got to start somewhere and there at least 50 ways I can think of to improve your SEO.  
Choose your hosting provider carefully
1. If you're targeting one specific region, say the UK, ensure that the physical IP address is country specific which will improve the likelihood of ranking in the UK
2. Always opt for a fixed IP address even if it costs slightly more
3. Run an IP address search to ensure the IP address hasn't been black listed before. Domain Tools are an excellent source for quick IP address lookup
4. Ensure the server returns accurate response:

• 200 OK The request has succeeded - As an example you should see this server response for your homepage (www.sitename.com)
• 301 Moved Permanently - As an example you should see this server response for your non www version of your homepage (sitename.com)
• 302 Found - Use this server response only if you are redirecting temporary
• 404 Not Found - Always display a correct 404 response so you can get an indication when a page is broken for better user experience

Increase crawl rates because you can never get enough of Google
5. To check when your site was last crawled and indexed, search for site:sitename.com and play with “date range” advanced search options
6. Update the site's content as often as possible. For online retailers, new promotions and offers offer a fantastic opportunity to update their content
7. Ensure pages are loading quickly by analyzing your code, content and images. Web Page Analyzer is an excellent source to analyze a page load time
8. Fix duplicate content issue such as having two versions of your homepage, for example www.sitename.com and www.sitename.com/index.php
9. Add an XML site map and submit it to the major search engines

Ensure image optimisation across the site to enjoy traffic from Google image search
9. Keep images on a folder level rather than a subdomain so sitename.com/images/ is better than images.sitename.com
10. Use a descriptive name for the image, such as the product name
11. Use alt text for all your images and use a descriptive name again for the image alt text name
12. Use caption by placing a small description directly under, on top or on the side of your image
13. When possible save the image as jpg format
14. Use a free tool such as xenu to find images with no alt text

Ensure metadata optimisation to get high level of qualified traffic
15. Ensure that every page has unique metadata in terms of page title and page description
16. Limited page title to 70 characters and page description to 150 characters
17. Don't bother too much about keywords, do something else
18. Optimise each page around one key term
19. Place the most important term first, followed by a soft (non spammy) call to action and brand
20. For product pages, opt for an auto generate metadata solution based on <product title> + <call to action> at <site name>
21. Use AdWords ads to test the best text for better CTR by creating a few ad variation in AdWords which include your key term

Content is truly king
22. Every page should have unique content which reads well for users (and therefore for the search engine spiders as well)
23. Don't repeat the key term more than 3 times so to avoid keyword stuffing
24. Place the key term in the page H1 title, image alt text and once in bold
25. Use "recommended products" to link between similar products to increase their relevancy

Apply essential URL and coding tweaks
26. Use robot.txt to block parts of the site you don't wish the engines to index
27. Offer an HTML site map which is auto updated based on the XML site map
28. For sites running on PHP use an .htaccess file to avoid content duplication
29. Use breadcrumbs navigation across the site for better user experience and SEO
30. From time to time, view your site using a text browser such as SEO Browser to "see" how spiders are likely to find your on page content
31. If your site architecture has more than three levels, restructure it so to m ake the information more accessible to both users and spiders
32. Keep URLs short for better SEO and to create a better viral effect as short URLs are more memorable
33. Include your key term such as a product title in the URL

Apply essential maintenance from time to time
34. Fix all your 404 errors and consider redirecting to a more appropriate page
35. When products are removed from stock or discontinued ensure that a 301 is placed to the main category or to a similar product
36. When linking to another site, consider checking whether you're linking to a bad neighborhood using a free tool such as text link checker
37. If you have multiple domains unify around one domain using a 301 redirect taking into account links pointing to each domain, domain age and the domain name

The Google PageRank issue
38. Don't pay too much attention to Google PR as it won't effect your ranking
39. If you want to control page rank, use a nofollow HTML attribute on pages such as "terms and conditions", "privacy policy" etc

Content is king, so start blogging
40. Place your blog on a directory level so www.sitename.com/blog/ rather than a sub domain blog.sitename.com
41. Blogging at least once a week will help increase your crawl rate
42. Read The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

Get more links, otherwise no one will see you
43. If you're considering directories as part if your link acquisition, focus on quality reviewed directories such as Yahoo and Best of the Web
44. Don't pay for links, you'll get caught at some point
45. Help your customers help you by placing on each page an easy way to share content using a sharing tool such as AddToAny
46. Ask for links take 1 - place a nice soft request in your website sale confirmation email to link back to your site
47. Ask for links take 2 - ask your suppliers and contractors for a link
48. Give blogger prior notice of new products and ask for a review
49. Offer great products at competitive prices and the links will come organically
50. Kick off a social media strategy to encourage discussion (and links) on social networks and other user-powered sites