Every webmaster is concerned as to what SEO techniques should be followed to gain a maximum search engine rating and exposure. Wouldn't it be nice to have a concrete checklist of such items? The following is my effort to create a comprehensive system of simple SEO techniques that with time will guarantee a top ranking for your site.

1. Select a list of realistic keywords

First, let me explain how the keyword selection process works. The tool I highly recommend on using is a Keyword Selector Tool from Overture, notable feature of which is ability to see keywords or keyword phrases that are most popular and bring the largest number of visitors. When selecting your keywords, keep the following in mind:

• Highly ranked keywords are already taken

• Target low-medium traffic keywords

As you can see, less competitive keywords have a greater potential of bringing more traffic. So be smart about picking your keywords, avoid highly competitive ones, but also don't settle for the rock bottom.

• Be specific when selecting keywords

2. Incorporate keywords in your Title tags

Search Engines place high importance on what you have in your Title tags. In fact it's so important, that Google lists search results by Title tags. You can see your search queue bolded in each item. It's very important that every page on your site contains a title,every title contains a keyword or a keyword phrase, and your content matches the idea behind your Title. More on that last one to follow.

3. Optimize your content for selected keywords

Content is king on the Net and Google prides itself for bringing you the most relevant results. So here's a list of must-do content optimization techniques.

• Place keywords in H1, H2,... tags

• Use keywords in your anchor text

• Separate your keywords from the rest of content

• Move more important keywords toward the top of the page

• Interlink pages like crazy

4. Create a robots.txt file

Robots such as Googlebot come to your page and the first thing they look for is arobots.txt file that contains a list of instructions. Robots.txt should be located in the root directory of your site and using it, you can specify which pages you want indexed, which ones you don't, which robots you want indexing your content, which ones you don't. The list goes on. In this article I will assume that your goal is to have all bots index all your pages. Open up that Notepad and begin writing some code.

This code snippet allows all bots to index your entire site. If you want to take full control of robots.txt, I highly recommend reading a full set of instructions at SearchEngine World.

If you don't feel like writing a robots.txt file, you can use the following meta tag:

This tells robots to follow the links from this page to get more pages.

5. Create a Sitemap

Sitemaps are great for letting Search Engines know where to look for new pages. You should make sure that every page is reachable via links on your site and you'll have no troubles getting indexed by robots. Remember that content is food for robots and they are pretty hungry. If you haven't done so already, you should take advantage of Google's Sitemaps program where you manually tell Googlebot which pages are indexable and how often they are updated, which brings me to my next point

6. Keep your content fresh all the time

You will not get indexed if Search Engines stop visiting you and you will not rank highly if you stop getting indexed. Google and other Search Engines love fresh content. This is part of the reason why certain blogs are outperforming major websites. Keeping content fresh can be as easy as incorporating RSS headlines on your pages or as time consuming as adding a blog to a corporate website.

7. Acquire relevant backlinks

To gain importance, you need important sites to link to you. Of coarse to have that done, you need to be useful enough to get a backlink. In either case, .gov or .edu backlinks are jackpot. Google boosts you up the rankings in a matter of days, depending on how often Googlebot crawls your site. There are a few black-hat SEO techniques to get .gov and .edu backlinks, but I won't get into them here. This is purely white-hat SEO. If you are interested though, shoot me an e-mail and I'll do my best to educate you.

Anyway, try to get sites in your niche to link to you. They should be optimized for similar keywords as yourself, and links should have anchor text that contains your site's keywords.

8. Get older and wiser

Google naturally ranks older pages higher than their younger competitors. Reasoning behind that is obvious I think. There are techniques such as purchasing an older domain name, but I don't recommend spending your money on that. Google's current algorithm also monitors the number of times domain name has changed owners and incorporates that into determining rank. My best recommendation is

9. Be patient

When it comes to Google or any other Search Engine, patience is the key. Factors like Sandbox have some part in webmasters' irritations. It all boils down to determining how trusted your site is. Backlinks play a major role. In this case, you might acquire a single backlink from a well ranked site and fly up the rankings, while tens of backlinks from lower ranked dot-com's will barely wiggle your toes.

Most importantly remember, it takes time for Google to index the Web. Billions of sites are updated daily and they all need to be crawled. A few extra incoming links can shorten the wait period by a lot, so that should be your goal for the next few months while you patiently wait. Now on to the final point.

10. Don't cheat the bots

You worked so hard on building content, optimizing your pages, researching keywords, and reading SEO techniques. Don't go on and waste all of this just by spaming sites with links (comment spam on blogs), over-stuffing content with keywords (please, people are actually reading you!), or hiding text (blending your keywords into the background just for bots sakes). I don't want to go into all black-hat techniques here, you get the idea. The point is that simple misdemeanors like that can get you banned from Google or any other Search Engine. After spending so much time trying to get in, it would suck to get kicked out, wouldn’t it?

The URL structure can play a very important part of any SEO campaign and is something that you should always take great care and consideration when planning a new website, again, especially more so if the site is going to be driven by a database with thousands of possible data outputs.

What Is The URL Structure?

It is very easy to go into unnecessary complex details when explaining what the URL structure of a website is, and indeed there are a few elements, but the basic answer is the URL structure is how your URL looks to search engines and of course your clients.

Take for example two different websites, WebsiteA and WebsiteB. Both sites deliver thousands of products for sale to the general public, everything from washing machines to fridge freezers. They are both database driven sites, they are both offering the same kind of products and are both hosted in the UK, so in theory, should be similar in ranking.

We are going to look at the example of a Zanussi Washing Machine, for not other reason than I have just purchased one and it looks nice! SiteA doesn't really understand the importance of URL structure and therefore all of its links are similar to:

WebsiteA/1ddsdfggt00455429493ttreee466319?cm34_re34ee4

SiteB is really switched on and therefore understands the importance of the URL structure to the search engines, so its URL is similar to:

WebsiteB/washing_machines/Zanussi/ZANUSSI_ZWF140701_White_Washing_Machine

Straight away you can begin to see the difference of how the search engines will take to the links. WebsiteA tells the search engine nothing about the product, whereas WebsiteB not only tells the search engine the product detail, but also that it is a washing machine and in fact a Zanussi Washing Machine in white colours.

So when the customer searches for a Zanussi Washing Machine, WebsiteB has a far greater chance of ranking well, where as it will take WebsiteA a lot more time and hard work to rank for this product.

When designing your website, make sure you place as much importance on your URLs as anything you are considering in your planning stages. Getting this right from the start will make sure your site is indexed correctly as you really do not want to go changing your structure half way through the indexing process, or even worse, a year down the line.