Here are search engine optimization pointers collected for your convenience. These will be incorporated into your website pricing. Don't pay some company $thousands to do this SEO for you.

Search Optimization Basics

Overview: Avoid frames pages. Google and Inktomi crawl frames, but not all search engines do. Avoid flash pages. Freshen text periodically. Use static pages (not dynamically generated pages, cgi or database-driven.) Links with "?" and "&" characters that separate CGI variables are difficult for search engines to crawl (though Google can handle this.)

Optimize existing pages, weaving in key words. Put keywords in title, metatags and text. Use <h1> to highlight subsections, making sure keywords are within the headline tags.

Be patient. The major search engines may not fully index the new pages for 3-6 months from first submission.

1. DOORWAY pages:

Include Sitelist link at bottom of the home page, in small but readable text, that accesses a "Doorway" page with a listing of all pages/folders you wish to SEO. Have this sitelist page look attractive.
Doorway pages (listed on site list):
Name the pages and folders with the key words:
www.yoursite.com/keyword/keyword.html

Pick the key word(s) or phrase you want to emphasize. Pick phrases of two or more words. Repeat the keyword phrases five times. Have at least 5 well-written paragraphs so it offers relevant content. Have a CALL TO ACTION on each page.

If you don't want your doorway page to show up in the search engines, create a crawler page that lists every page you want crawled. This page should have no text or tags, just links to pages. i.e. ‹a href="page.html">yourURL.com: keywords listed‹/a>

2. Metatags at top of each page:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="brief description of the page highlighting relevant words. Make it readable.">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="search engine optimization--put list of words, preferably in groupings that might be searched -- not just single words. Repeat the keyword twice and no more.">< META name="Classification" content="bad credit loans">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index, follow">
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="12 days">
< META NAME="distribution" content="global">
<META NAME="rating" content="General">

Use words that will likely be used to search for your website. Choose 3-4 primary words and create phrases from those words; then create the content of your web pages using those words and phrases. Those phrases must be in the body, the title, and the Meta description of the web page you are working on, with particular emphasis being on the body of the web page. The content must make sense to your visitors in order to get your message across to them! Write your text around your chosen words. Writing with your targeted words and phrases in mind will allow your content to flow smoothly.
Use only keywords that are relevant to your web site. You want to capture readers who are truly interested in your product.

3. Javascript: If javascript is used on the page: put at top right under body tag (from OSloans.com):

<noscript>
< h1><font size="3">Mortgage correspondent lender</font></h1>
< h2><font size="2">Our staff of correspondent mortgage lender professionals is dedicated to providing lenders with the innovative products and reliable service they need to grow their business. </font></h2>
< p>Oak Street offers mortgage correspondents a full line of non-conforming loans including home refinance, equity and purchase loans, all at attractive rates.</p>
< >Yourcompany.com specializes in finding the right product for customers that will work for their borrowers.</p>
< /noscript>

Use external j.s. where possible so text does not get pushed down the page.

4. Put a commented out tag toward top of page :

<!--This page is about ---list words that describe services, product // -->

5. TITLES
Lead the title with the keyword / SEO phrase. Repeat variations. Build your titles around the top two or three phrases for which you would like the page to be found. The titles should be relatively short and attractive. Think of newspaper headlines. With a few words, they make you want to read a story. Similarly, your page titles are like headlines for your pages. They appear in search engine listings and a short, attractive title may help make users click through to your site. Make the title less than 40 characters long.

6. TABLE tags:

Add the keyword in every single table on the page.

<table summary="KEYWORD" border="0" cellpadding="0" width="780" height="1">

7. IMAGES:
Use the ALT for every single image.

<img border="0" src="images/logo.gif" width="12" height="11" alt="Describe title and work in the keyword if it makes sense!">

8. LINKS <A HREF>:
Every link should have a title="keyword" within coding. Consider making every link an absolute URL -- even though this makes it difficult to preview your work during development. Don't expect image map links to be searched, so use HTML links.

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.yourcompany.com/key-word-phrase.pdf"
title="key word phrase here">Repeat key word in the actual link</a>

9. Headlines:

Use headlines at the top of the page. Consider putting a tag line at the top of the page with key words.
Use an <h> around the key words. Even better, use the style sheets to make the <h1> look like normal bodytext if that suits the page better. Make sure keywords are in the headlines.

10. Put words near the top of your coding.
Some search engines pick up the first words on the page. Make sure there are  words on each page - not just images or flash or a comment-- and make sure these words are a readable sentence. Put a few keywords in small text at the top of the page just to be sure; make them look ornamental. (Done for OSMLoans.com) See No. 9.

11. Text on doorway pages:
Pick the key word(s) or phrase you want to emphasize. Repeat the keyword phrases five times. Have at least 5 paragraphs so it looks like a "real page." Have a CALL TO ACTION (ask your viewers to enroll, sign up, apply, download...whatever) on each page. Choose keywords that are relevant to the field; phrases unique to the business. Include popular misspellings of words. You can find how searchers access your site by looking at weblogs.

12. Make the doorway pages extremely fast loading. Limited images. No flash.

13. Link to other sites :
Have pages link to other relevant websites that you run to create exposure. Example: Have parent site page(s) link to sites that company might also run.

14. Keyword Links :
Create as many links on the page using keywords in the link name.

15. Repeat the links :
in a site map at the bottom of the page. Make the links ABSOLUTE URLs.

16. Develop content rich pages.
Refresh the text periodically. Make it worthwhile for someone to find your pages!

17. Know what the search engines look for.

Tips above are culled from searchenginewatch.com and seoinc:
Google looks at the words on the page, the links, the text of the links pointing to that page, and various other items on the page like proximity of adjacent words and so on. There are about 100 additional factors considered and those factors are constantly being tweaked to improve the ranking to make it more relevant.
Like Yahoo, Google updates its index frequently. Google looks for content that has changed recently or that changes regularly over time.

18. Submission
Many search engines do not charge for registering a web site with them. Every search engine has a link to "add your site," "add URL" or "suggest a site." Many search engines provide this link on their Home Page, though a few good search engines urge you to select the appropriate category and then allow you to add the URL to the same. Thus, making the whole process a bit simpler. Normally, the URL or Link Submission form will ask for details like the title, keywords, description, the name of the company, first name, last name, contact details, e-mail address and many other things, depending on a search engine / its search engine policy. Please take note that there is a restriction on submitting the title size, the number of keywords to be used and length of the description. Some search engines restrict the number of keywords to 10, 15, 20. Similarly, a title may comprise of 50 - 80 characters. The description may range between 100 characters to 300 characters. Done manually, it takes an average of five minutes (approx.) to fill up a form on one search engine. The process of locating the search engines, visiting each of them, finding the submission form & filling in the details - is long, tedious and almost impossible prospect, when you have as many as 1500+ search engines ! You must be aware of a few popular search engines like HotBot, Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Goto, Google, Excite, Alltheweb, Northernlight and also some from your country of origin.

Tips from webmonkey.com:
No trap doors, redirects, keyword spam, and multiple domain names. Submission tips, etc: webmonkey tips

Major Search engines:
Yahoo (now powers over half of the US web searches).
Google
LookSmart
Ask Jeeves (the number two pure search engine/ number five overall)

Building Links:

Major crawler-based search engines use link analysis as part of their ranking algorithms. This is done because it is difficult for webmasters to "fake" good links, in the way they might try to spam search engines by manipulating the words on their web pages. As a result, link analysis gives search engines a useful means of determining which pages are good for particular topics. The more meaningful and relevant links you have - the higher your search engine rankings will be.

By building links, you can help improve how well your pages do in link analysis systems. The key is understanding that link analysis is not about "popularity." In other words, it's not an issue of getting lots of links from anywhere. Instead, you want links from good web pages that are related to the topics you want to be found for.  
Consider a "Links" page for your website and approach other websites in order to get you listed on their sites.  This will help drive traffic from their sites and also improve your standings in search engines.  

Web eHow.com

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