There is nothing worse than having a beautiful web site with excellent written content, though you still lose traffic or you even keep potential visitors away, while your site cannot be found.
Before you begin optimizing your pages for Search Engines, consider that the following search engine optimization techniques are SPAM!
* automatically generated doorway pages;
* cloaking and false redirects;
* keyword stuffing;
* hidden text or hidden links;
* pages loaded with irrelevant words;
* duplicated content on multiple pages;
* misspelling of well-known web sites;
* unrelated and centralized link farms;
* other methods that try to trick search engines.
If you use one of the above techniques, you might get short term results, but it’s most likely that your site will be banned from search engines, and therefore you will put your business at severe risk.
If site is less then six months old stop reading now. Site is too new to be worrying about getting all of your pages indexed. Be patient. It takes time to crawl through your whole website and add pages to the index. If pages are search engine friendly then you have nothing to worry about.
If your site is six months old or older need to check website to make sure all of pages can be found and indexed. Have:
1) Made a human sitemap?
2) Made a Google or Yahoo sitemap?
3) Used search engine friendly URLs?
4) Used search engine friendly navigation?
An additional note: get incoming links. These are important for the search engines’ algorithms and may play an important part in how deep the search engines will crawl website.
Do it by hand. It will not take long to do and will ensure that you are successful in submitting each form with the correct information. There is a constant debate about how search engines feel about automated submission software. Since there is a reasonable chance these are frowned upon by the search engines, and since you can do anything they can do on your own, you might as well avoid them.
“Fighting for a #1 position often unwittingly wins you other prizes along the way.” Though your assumptions we’re equally correct, my actual intention for this was in reference to longtail keywords. If you’re shooting for the #1 most popular keyword, you often pick up less significant longtail keyword searches along the way (if your content is diverse and of quality.)
Also, as far as forum signatures and blog posting, I still believe this is a valid way of driving traffic as well as increasing exposure to fellow relevant webmasters, but this is only so if you contribute quality info. When SEO’s spam with poor quality information purely to advertise, they’re likely to be deleted. Also, most of these areas are set up to not allow link juice to pass from your link. Therefore, it’s only worth the traffic, and that only comes from good content.
I really like analysis of the tag and how you laid out your methodology. Very clean, direct, and true.
Wal-Mart gets away with what it gets away with because of its authority; and you were quick to address that fact. However, much more eloquently than myself, you also addressed that there is a relevance between keyword strength and keyword placement and that efforts at brand recognition in the tag can work against organic placement. It’s a critical element (the tag) that so many hum and buzz about just because *some* successful sites seem to break all of the ‘common sense rules’ that normal visibility tactics successfully follow. Huge, dominant sites are sometimes an exception to the rule, not the standard of it.
I mean, really, think about it: It goes against relative common sense to title a book “Don’t Read This Book, Whatever You Do!” but, don’t you wish *you’d* thought of it first? And, aren’t you glad that everyone else didn’t change their book’s name to the same thing?
Before you begin optimizing your pages for Search Engines, consider that the following search engine optimization techniques are SPAM!