• Site structure, naming conventions
• Use of keywords and Defining Keywords
• Use of Meta tags (how/why)
• Hierarchy and text links
• Linking (to you) and Natural linking
• Robots.txt (why yes/no)

• Consider using keywords in actual file names – use underscore to separate words.
• www.site.com/web_optimizing_techniques.htm (Yes)
• www.site.com/weboptimizingtechniques.htm (No)
• Incorporate a keyword in the actual domain name www.annaGRAPHICS.com
• Use descriptive (keywords) for image file names, but keep the words relevant to the image.
• Naming your images with keywords can give you a boost in relevancy.
  Plus, some of the engines have image search engines where this can be helpful.
  

Keywords.. Meta tags

• The Meta keyword tag in particular is NOT used by many of the major search engines including Google
• The placement of your keywords IS very important and the Meta keyword tag can actually have a negative impact on your site's ranking
• If the keyword doesn't appear somewhere on your page, don't place it in your keyword meta tag (!)
• Place more importance of keywords in the body text on the page
• There are NO search engines that decide your ranking based solely on Meta Tags.
  

Keyword Meta Tag specs

• Use it to list keywords
• Limit to 1024 characters
• List keywords in order of importance
• Don’t repeat a keyword more than 7 times
• The more keywords used, the less weight each carries (!)
  Commas are ok. (No issue)

• Your keywords MUST appear in on your page. If the keyword IS in the Meta Keyword tag, and
  ..not present in the actual text of the page,
  ..not present in the title of the page, 
  
  ..the search engines will often consider this an irrelevant keyword and drop the ranking of your page!

• Google does not use the Meta Description tag. (?)
• The 'description' tag returns a description of the page for some search engines.
• Not all search engines will use your Meta description tag, some will take the first lines of text from your page and use that as the summary you see in the search engines.
• Carefully craft the first lines of your page text!

Robots.txt

More..

• Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in URLs, may not be included in index.
• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, known as "cloaking."

this document won't be indexed :

• <META NAME="ROBOTS"CONTENT="NOINDEX">

the links in this document will not be parsed by the robot:

• <META NAME="ROBOTS"CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">

The "/robots.txt" file usually contains a record looking like this:

• User-agent: *Disallow: /cgi-bin/Disallow:/tmp/Disallow: /~joe/
  In this example, three directories are excluded.

• Note that you need a separate "Disallow" line for every URL prefix you want to exclude -- you cannot say "Disallow: /cgi-bin/ /tmp/".
• Also, you may not have blank lines in a record, as they are used to delimit multiple records.
• Note also that regular expression are not supported in either the User-agent or Disallow lines.
• The '*' in the User-agent field is a special value meaning "any robot". Specifically, you cannot have lines like "Disallow: /tmp/*" or "Disallow: *.gif".
• What you want to exclude depends on your server. Everything not explicitly disallowed is considered fair game to retrieve.

• To exclude all robots from the entire server
  • User-agent: *
    Disallow: /
• To allow all robots complete access
  • User-agent: *
    Disallow

• To exclude all robots from part of the server
  • User-agent: *
    Disallow: /cgi-bin/
    Disallow: /tmp/
    Disallow: /private/
• To exclude a single robot
  • User-agent: BadBot
    Disallow: /
    • Where "BadBot" is a search engine you want to exclu

• Use moderation in everything you do in search engine optimization.
• Update site regularly..
• Maintain and refresh the content..