Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem. 
1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.
6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.
Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an SEO trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over 10 years experience in search engine optimization, web development and marketing.
Can’t wait to use these tips.
I m newbie in seo last five months.
Here I learned something new.
These tips are ” Superb” for me easy to understand and applying in website.
Thanks and best of luck to your writing.
Funny, the website on SEO did exactly what SEO is supposed to do, helping me to learn more about it, and pulling me to the most relevant one. Great website, very informative. BTW, due to you responding to your critics after the fact of writing the article, you built your credibility with me as a true expert on the topic. Good job proving your own words true.
This article is really good. It is comprehensive and helpful. Surely we will recommend to our customers who want to promote their websites.
Thanks for writing this good stuff.
Great SEO tips! Now I know how to promote my blog. Will follow this 55 tips.
Thanks for using plan english. Good tips.
Great content is the most important thing in my book, but I have seen Google list a brand new site really high for a competitive keyword. I think it is all up to how Google feels that day.
great,55 tips will bring us a lot of favor, i will move on.
helping me to learn more about it, and pulling me to the most relevant one. Great website, very informative
Great tips. I really appreciate it. Very useful.
Excellent tips. I find that I get listed using Digg. Google picks up Digg very very fast, within minutes! I learned a lot from your tips thanks!
thanks for your tips, useful.
Thanks …. really loved that both me n my mumma :)
You come across very few articles that is to the point without wasting words or reading time. Excellent tips and I am sure I can use a few of them.
thanks for the great and useful tips, its helps to improved my site.
Thank you… very good ;)
Very usefull infomation. Thanks for sharing.
Really nice. I liked the tip about “get the CEO blogging”
Keep up the good work.
Google picks up Digg very very fast, within minutes! I learned a lot from your tips thanks!
Thanks for a VERY informative article. I learned a few things I hadn’t thought of before. Real estate investors need to learn more about the internet and SEO.
Steve
Great tips, total n00b here, learned a lot to help my own site out. Thanks.
Nice one, especially that me and my mumma part
:)
Love your title my mother made me read it and yes she loves it as well lol.
Great info it holds true today as when you made this post very timeless quality information. I have found twitter also gets me traffic and links have you tried twitter as well?
I’ve practiced some of these tips on my first site, http://scrabblecheat.com
I can’t see any problem with any of the tips. The best tip is to focus on one keyword phrase at a time. I’ve noticed you kill your own keywords by doing more than one at a time. You won’t rank best for either, just average for both. So rank high for one at a time then work on the other later.
great article.
If you really want a useful tool to ensure that your page is SEO friendly you should check out Hubspot’s free site grader tool: http://www.websitegrader.com/
I use this tool for client’s websites all the time. And no, I don’t work for Hubspot or even pay for their affiliate program.
Wonderful.
This article has covered all the important steps to be followed in SEO.
It really helps me to boost my rank in SERP.
This is a great list. Don’t forget about RhinoSEO Website Grader. (http://grader.rhinoseo.com/) It offers the similar grading as hubspot but looks at other factors too like sitemaps
You covered a lot of information here, great job putting it all together. I am going to link back to this post in my blog. Excellent article!
Thanks for the information. Very Useful :)
Hi,
Great tips. Thanks and I look forward to more useful articles from you.
This article is awesome, I just created my own site for my business. The biggest issues that I find can hold a site back is flash design. So to overcome that issue, I created a normal HTML page as a enter page and I’m adding more links to that. If I knew that it would be difficult with flash, I would have created the site DHTML and some CSS. But this page really gave me some insight to what it should be for the SEO. Thanks!
GREATE THIS IS VERY USEFULL TIPS
THANS
Thanks for your tips..
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Great tips. Thanks and I look forward to more useful articles from you.
your all seo tips is very help ful for me
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thanks for your all seo tips
Thanks
Thanks, very thorough. A lot to think about and go back and re-evaluate. Much appreciated
On my site I used to link to the home page with “index.html” – but I noticed lots of leading web design sites just us “/” – is this the best way of doing things?
Thanks for the tips! I’m going to print these out and implement them.
That’s a great list. . This is extremely wonderful job. I appreciate your hardwork to find this job and thanks for sharing to the SEO community. You must have spend lot of time to compile it.
Thanks
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Its really a nice information. I will implement it on my all sites and blogs.
Thanks
What great tips. I am going to try implementation soon! Wondering if each of my items should be placed on at’s own seperate page? or in small qroups on pages?
Awesome…thanks you for the tips ^^
Thansk for the great SEO tips. I have spent a lot of time working on my site and several of these tips are brand new to me. Thanks again.
You covered a lot of information here, great job putting it all together. I am going to link back to this post in my blog. Excellent article!
Thanks
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Great Tips.. Really its useful for SEO Professionals. Thanks for Sharing..
Thank you. I will be calling my SEO people first thing tomorrow.
thanks
i really much like the content written related seo marketing to promote our site in good searching . . i heartily thank you for this spreading the SEO knowledge around the global though WWW path
thanks again
Ram Babu SEO Professional
Thank you for these tips. They will be very helpful in continuing maintainence of my site.
That is some long and great list of ideas. Now the time has come to implement them. thanks
Thanks for compiling this list. All in all I found it very useful. However, one thing that I would not recommend though is #11… adding a 301 redirect. I tried doing that as a means to consolidate traffic from a domain (www.relicpro.com) to a subdomain (photography.relicpro.com). As a result, I lost all of my SEO juice that I’d spent years building up for my main domain, and completely disappeared from search results for anything having to do with Photographer Portland or Wedding Photography Portland. It will probably take a long time to undo the damage to my SEO that I’ve done with that move. Needless to say, I would not recommend doing that.
Thanks Richard. Great tips – going to implement on my site.
Thanks so much for this, rebuilding my sites and these tips sure come in handy as a useful reminder.
Thanks This Information Has Been Very Very helpful With My SEO Success! Thanks Please keep the Value Coming! God Bless!
The 55 tips that r mentioned above r really good for the people who r are at the learning stage of SEO. thanks and great work done
Great tips Richard!
just re-did my company website. Your tip will come in real handy as i try to drive traffic to it. Thanks