If you want your online business to be successful, it is imperative to optimize your site on a regular basis to maintain good pole position in the Web’s top search engines. However, in order to maintain your ranking, you have to keep on top of what’s happening in the rapidly changing search engine industry. The rules that affected your ranking yesterday may be meaningless tomorrow. For instance, you need to be aware of search engine changes, and frequently changing algorithms. In order to help keep you on top of these changes, be mindful of the Dos and Don’ts!

The Dos

1. Ask relevant sites to link to your site. These days, links are king. Search engines place a huge amount of importance on the number of sites that link to yours. The more relevant, the better.
2. Pay attention to keyword inclusion and placement. The most useful places to include them are:
1. In your domain name.
2. In the title tags in your source code.
3. In the meta description of your site. This is much less important than it used to be, but it can’t hurt.
4. In your meta keyword tags
3. Create content-rich information pages to direct traffic to your site. An easy way to boost the number of pages that link to your site is to create some pages with valuable content.
4. Submit your site to online directories. Be sure to submit your site to important directories such as Yahoo!, the Open Directory Project and About.com, as well as smaller directories.
5. Multiply and conquer. Create a community of related sites that link to each other.

The Don’ts

1. Beware of irrelevant links. Yes, it’s a good idea to get a lot of different links pointing to your site, but the search engines only like relevant links.
2. Beware of irrelevant keywords. Search engines hate finding irrelevant keywords on your site, especially in your meta tags.
3. Don’t “keyword stuff” your meta tags. In the past, people used to repeat their keywords in their meta tags over and over again. Don’t.
4. Don’t create “link farms.” Link farms are the evil cousins of the information pages we discussed above.
5. Avoid “free for all” link pages. Don’t bother placing links to your site on pages where everyone and their cousin is invited to put up a link.

In Summary

Recent research by search engine optimization experts suggests that there’s a surprising lack of overlap between the results produced by the major search engines. This could mean that webmasters are focusing their optimization efforts solely on one search engine while neglecting to improve their ranking with the other. Or they might be using optimization tactics that work for Google on Yahoo!, without being aware that Yahoo! uses different criteria to index a site. Either way, sites that aren’t optimized for both Google and Yahoo! are missing out on a lot of potential visitors.