One of the most frustrating things about starting a new blog or website is trying to adhere to all the various rules required to get you ranked high on a search engine.  Search engines are the Holy Grail and gateway to bringing new visitors to your site and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an extremely important aspect.

Doing your own research on the web, you're going to find a whole whack of sites talking about this tip and that tip...some of these tips don't even have anything to do with SEO.  For example, getting back links to your site is very important to increase your PageRank with search sites...but has nothing to do with actual SEO.

There is a lot of great reading material out there too like Seo Mindset By Brad Callen. It'll cost you more than trying to google through the thousands of websites out there talking about SEO, but you get what you pay for.

Let’s cover some quick tips that actually DO have something to do with SEO

Headings and Meta Tags 

One of the most important aspects of SEO is ensuring your make full and proper use of heading and meta tags.

Heading tags are HTML markup that looks like this: <H1>, <H2>, <H3>.

Using these to properly outline the heading of your page is very important to how search engines figure out what your site is about.

Meta tags are still used to some extent, but still very important.  Inserting the follow on every single page on your site is a must:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3”/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your site description”/>

These paired up with proper heading use will help search engines automatically figure out what your content is about and index your appropriately.

Page Titles

Not only is it very important to make sure every single webpage on your site has a page title, it is also very important to make sure they have a unique page title.

Page titles are widely used by search engines to figure out what contents the site has, but also used as a visible listing in their results. 

Make sure you have a unique name for every single page.

Sitemap 

Having a sitemap is absolutely critical, but don’t forget to actually submit it to search engines manually. 

A sitemap is basically an XML feed that outlines the content on your site.  You can either have a static sitemap like sitemap.xml or generate them dynamically similar to how this site does it like http://www.mycurrentgig.com/sitemap.axd

This way, search engines will be able to get updates to your site very quickly and adds another factor in determine how important your site is over other sites.

Content 

An easy one, having fresh content is critical.  You may find yourself posted high early on, but over time, your content will become stale and move down the search result list.

Adding new content or simply updating old content is a great way to show search engines that you’re keeping on top of things and the site has a life of its own.

Use SEO Software 

I had thought about adding a more relevant fifth tip for developers out there, but then it occurred to me, most bloggers may not have the time or care about all the techy junk mentioned above.

If you’re one of these people, seriously consider using SEO Software which will help automate a lot of the tips mentioned and remove the need to learn anything.

A software package like SEO Elite will remove a lot of the thinking for you.  The price is a little steep at $150+, but if you’re serious about optimizing your site, it is one of the best packages out there.

Check it out at http://www.seoelite.com.