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Use descriptive words in your URLs (unlike this blog!). eg http://bla.st/site/announcing-blast/
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Make sure all text is plain text and not an image. Search engines can't read images.
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Use the title tags eg. <h1>Main Heading</h1> and <h2>Sub Heading</h2> and use good descriptive keywords in them.
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Use lots of descriptive keywords in your text. Avoid marketing dribble.
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Use variations of terms on the same page, for example an article about notice-boards use "Noticeboard", "Notice-board", "Notice Board", and "Bulletin Board".
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Use alternate spellings of words on the same page eg. "colour" and "color".
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Put descriptive alt tags on your images.
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Ensure your site has a basic HTML sitemap that is easy for search engines to follow. Link to it from every page, perhaps in the footer. eg. http://powersite.co.nz/site_map.php
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Use plain links with your site navigation, not redirects or javascript.
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Make sure search engines find your site in the first place. You can submit your base URL to many search engines, and also put links from other sites that are crawled regularly. Googles submission page is http://www.google.com/addurl/. Personally I don't worry about submitting to lots of search engines, once Google starts indexing the site, the other engines soon follow.
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Submit your homepage and other key pages to sites like digg.com and netscape.com. Search engines love these sites, and the links will help engines find your site and help your rankings.
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Link to your site from other websites whenever you can, for example put your URL in forum posts.
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Use simple URLs without query strings eg. http://bla.st/design/1/ instead of http://bla.st/index.php?section=design&page=1. Note: this can be a bit complicated and requires mastering Apache URL rewrites.
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Have Patience! Google can take a week or so to crawl your site, and even longer for your rankings to improve.
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Meta Tags may help, although I feel it's better to have alternate spellings and keywords actually in your headings and text.
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Put your site on bla.st, our free promotional website, and on other directory websites. Your site will be listed with other related sites thus helping your search engine rankings.
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