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These tips were assembled from articles and content around the world. Hopefully these tips will help small business people increase the visibility of their websites on the Internet and save you time along the way.

1. Domain Names – If you are creating a new website, try to secure all key domain name types as well as .com.au (.com, .net and .org). This will secure your web identity and will prevent competitors from muscling in on your online presence. Why not read our guide to business domain names.

2. Frames – Once a popular way of publishing on the web, people very rarely use Frames these days, as search engines find them hard to index.

3. If your site is for an Australian audience, try and get an Australian Web Hosting Service.

4. Internal Navigation is as important as gaining external links. Make sure your site is well linked together, and that pages are not buried too deeply within your site’s navigation structure, otherwise the search engines may not find them.

5. Don’t hide “white” text within your web page, hoping the search engines will rank your page higher using hidden text. Your page is likely to be banned.

6. Try to place some of your keywords within your page URL’s (e.g. “pet_food_com.com.html” instead of “123298798324_uk123.html).

7. Take time creating your TITLE tags – this is the tag Google takes most notice of; the “Keywords” tag has less and less importance these days to search engines.

8. It will take many months before a new domain name is even ranked by Google (a phenomenon known as the “sandbox effect”, so if you are planning on getting a new domain – buy it now, set up some hosting and upload some good content, so that you don’t have to wait as long once you are ready to set up your site fully. Read our guide to the Google Sandbox.

9. Make sure you target keyword PHRASES as well as single keywords. Search engine marketing is so competitive now, that you’re better off targeting lots of phrases and gaining a few visitors for each one, then targeting a very competitive keyword and getting nowhere. Try our article on keyword suggestion tools.

10. Make sure your target search engine phrases actually match your page content – you cannot trick the search engines into believing your site is about “sheep”, when it all the content is about “horses”.

11. Try to use unique content on your site. Duplicate content may be penalised by the search engines and may not even make it to the main indexes if it appears elsewhere on the web.

12. Try to exchange links with your competitors. Links from sites of a similar subject are more valuable than links from sites of a completely different subject area to yours. Try our 2-part guide to link popularity.

13. Google completely dominates the search marketing world – often over 80% of all site visitors are generated by Google. Make sure you optimise your site for Google first before turning your attention to other engines such as Yahoo! and MSN.

14. Use an HTML checker to ensure that your code is accurate. Pages with messy code may be penalised by the search engines.

15. Check your site for broken links, as your site may be penalised for such errors.

16. Check your page load speed. Not only will Google frown on very slow loading sites, but visitors will leave right away if your site doesn’t load instantly.

17. Place relevant “anchor text” within your links to other pages on your site, instead of the usual “click here”.

18. Place your favourite keywords within the “alt” text of image tags. As ever, don’t overdo it, just some sensible words in a few places should suffice.

19. Do not embed links within Javascript code, as search engines won’t read them.

20. Create a dedicated “Page not Found” (404 page) in case a page on your site cannot be found. Ideally, this 404 page should contain a tidy site map for your site.

21. Update your site with relevant, unique content on a regular basis. Once the search engines know you regularly update your site, they will visit on a daily basis.

22. Try to gain links into your site from pages with a healthy Google Pagerank (the green bar on the Google Toolbar will display Pagerank). A Pagerank of 4 and above is often said to be a good starting point.

23. Try to be included on links pages with only a few links in total. If someone gives you a link from a page with 50 others, the link back to you will not be worth very much from a search engine ranking point of view.

24. Take your time building links. Gain good quality, relevant links over a reasonable period of time. Gaining hundreds of links in a few days may set off the alarm bells and imply that your site may be using “unethical” search engine techniques

25. Never use “doorway” pages. These are small, text rich pages which attempt to fool the search engines into ranking a page higher than it ought to be. Such tricks are used less and less now as the search engines get wiser each day to unethical web marketing practices.

26. Why not create a “site map” – not only is this useful for your visitors, but will also help the search engines find their way around the site.

27. Make use of “header” tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to break up your site content and create some order to your pages. Search engines will see text contained within such tags as being relatively important and will rank pages accordingly. As ever, don’t overdo it though.

28. There’s no point optimising your pages unless you know what people actually search for on the web. Use tools like wordtracker.com and Overture’s search engine suggestion tool to see what people are searching for.

29. Vary your TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags across your site’s pages. If your site pages are similar in content, try to focus on different aspects of each page’s contents rather than using the same keyword phrases each time.

30. If your site merits it, try to get included on news aggregator services like newsnow.co.uk and Google News. Each time your site is updated, these engines will spider your latest news and you should gain new visitors.

31. Age seems to be a very important factor in the way search engines rank websites. You might consider buying an older domain and benefiting from this longevity factor.

32. Try to get your site listed in the “Open Directory” at www.dmoz.org, as well as the Yahoo Directories (Australia and Worldwide). These are believed by many to have a strong impact on how “important” you site is seen to be by search engines.

33. If you contribute to web forums or bulletin boards, why not include your site URL in your signature.

34. Blogs are seen as a good and fast way to promote content-rich copy onto your website. They tend to be easily indexed by the major search engines and, if updated frequently, will add value to your site as a whole. Try our guide to business blogs.

35. Always spell check your content before publishing online. A great article will suddenly become “poor” if you include poor grammar or spelling.

36. Don’t use too many different fonts or colours within your site. Try to keep everything simple, uniform and fast loading. It’s no good attracting hundreds of new visitors to your site with excellent web marketing practices only to see them leave right away because your site design is rubbish.

37. Include your site URL in your email signatures. Potential clients and visitors may just click on those links.

38. Use copyscape.com to see if your site content has been reproduced anywhere else on the web. You don’t want your content to be duplicated elsewhere as your pages may be penalised.

39. Try to keep your internal directory structure from being too deep. 3 levels is often the recommended amount of depth, e.g. site.com/news/local/todays-news.html

40. You can update your robots.txt file (in your file root) if you want to prevent the search engine spiders from visiting certain areas of your site.

41. Try to keep your URL’s short and meaningful. Don’t try and cram 20 words into each URL – everything should be done in moderation.

42. Avoid link farms and FFA (Free for all) links pages. These are frowned upon by many web marketing experts and are often referred to as “bad neighbourhoods”.

43. Try not to use “dynamic” URLs as some search engines have trouble indexing such pages.

44. Some SEO experts recommend buying domains for the maximum time period possible as this would indicate that you’re serious (and not a “spammer”). Australian domains tend to last 2 years anyway, so presumably such wisdom would apply to .com domain names.

45. No problem if you pay someone to do your web marketing for you. But beware – if someone promises to get your site to “No.1 in Google” within 48 hours – this will mean you will be paying to ADVERTISE via Google Adwords. You will not be ranking organically for anything within 48 hours!

46. When building external links to your site, always think QUALITY, not QUANTITY. One good quality link from an established, authority site could do far more for you than hundreds of links from irrelevant so-called “directory” sites.

47. Don’t feel obliged to reciprocate links with other sites simply because another site owner has requested it. Have a good look at the other site before exchanging links.

48. Using “Bold” HTML tags not only tells your readers that the enclosed text is important – search engines will also take this into account when analysing your page content.

49. Keyword density is important. Without overdoing it, make sure your chosen keyword phrases appear a reasonable amount of times within a page. Your keywords should always be faithful to the genuine content of your pages if you want to rank well.

50. Search Engine Marketing is an ONGOING activity. You should constantly review your search engine rankings, add new fresh content on a regular basis, and build up good quality links with similar sites to yours. And, don’t expect to rank No.1 within a few weeks.  

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