"Insider Tips" To Making Your Site Search Engine Friendly:

Hi, and thanks for taking me up on my "invitation only" to visit this insiders guide to Search Engine optimization secrets.

The key to getting the most out of your SEPT membership is to use all of the tools we offer, not just the auto submitter. These tools and the following website optimization tips will ensure your success in getting your site listed.

SEPT is a wonderful tool that can help you advance your goals and reward you with getting your site listed, but even the best tool isn't effective if you don't use it properly.

Your failure to lay the proper groundwork can sabotage your future success.

The first step is making your website search engine friendly. Now don't be scared if you're not a web designer. Most, if not all of these tips we're going to talk about can be done with even a rudimentary understanding of html. If you have a webmaster, this will be a piece of cake for him as well.

To make your website search engine friendly, here are some quick tips.

1) Make Sure You Use The Proper Meta-Tags:

Here's why: Proper, descriptive meta-tags tell the search engines what your site is all about. Without them you still might get listed, but you might end up on page 3,005 of the search results page! Not all search engine make use of the "meta tag," but many do so make sure that you use them.

2) No Flash Pages.

Here's why: Flash is cool, but most search engines can't read it. There are exceptions like Google, which can read flash, but why complicate things? Keep it simple and make your site easily accessible to all search engines. If your main page is flash only, chances are the Search Engines will not spider your page.

3) No Frame Pages.

Here's why: Getting a search engine to correctly spider a site built with frames is really tricky and not for the timid at heart. The problem is that frames just confuse the search engine spiders, they just don't know what to do when they hit a frames page. They index the wrong content or worse they just go someplace else and ignore your site.

4) Make Each Page Of Your Site "Content Specific."

Here's why: Competition between today's search engines is pretty fierce as they are all looking to provide the most relevant content for their users. So by focusing each page of your web site on a specific topic or "theme" you are making easy for the search engines to determine what your site is about and where they should place it in their rankings.

5) Use External Cascading Style Sheets

Here's why: Now before you get all freaked out and say, "What's that?", cascading style sheets are not something to be afraid of. They're very easy to use and every single web site design software give you the ability to create cascading style sheets quickly and easily.

The advantage to using them is that they cut down on the amount of raw HTML code that your page uses.What this does is in the fact causes your ad copy and text to have a greater "weight" in the page than the surrounding HTML code. Cascading style sheets also make for smaller pages which means the load faster for your visitors as well.

6) Keep Outgoing Links Off Of Your Page To a Minimum.

Here's why: You want the search engine spiders to follow all the links on your homepage that lead to other pages within your site. The idea being that your entire site gets indexed and listed. However some people mistakenly put links that lead outside of their site on their main page. The danger here is that the search engine spider will hit one of these external outgoing links and leave your site before it's finished indexing your complete web.

7) Make Each Page Have A Specific Content Theme.

Here's why: Much like making sure that your site has content specific information on each page, each page should have a specific theme that is somehow related to the rest of the pages on your site.

For Example: If if your site was about flowers, creating pages about roses, violets, sunflowers, and orchids is a great example of what were talking about. Each page has content specific information about that type of "flower", yet the web sites theme is about flowers as well.

8) Keep Your Graphics To A Minimum.

Here's why: It's been said 100 times before but it needs said again; pictures do not sell words sell. If your web site design consist predominantly off graphics you're doing yourself and your visitors a huge disservice.

First, search engine spiders can read graphics, they don't know what they are or what they're supposed to mean. So they pretty much just ignore them and your site is pretty much just graphics you could be ignored as well.

Secondly, even the best optimized graphics cause your page to load slower. With over 50% of the nation still connecting to the Internet with 28.8 bps modems, your page load time is critical. Reduced the number of graphics you use, can reduce your page load time.

9) Make Sure You Use The "alt-tag" For all Of Your Graphics.

Here's why: For the graphics that you to use on your web site make sure that you use the special "ALT -tag" for each graphic.

This special tag was originally designed so that people could tell from your description what the graphic was if they had graphics turned off in their browser.

However that rarely happens these days but you should still use this special tag and here's why: First it gives you the opportunity to add keyword phrase is to your site and increase your sites keyword density. Make sure you use "keyword phrases" like Columbian coffee" and and not standalone keywords like "Coffee" as these tend to be ignored by the search engines, and research shows that web surfers most often search using two to three words phrases when doing online searches.

10) Trade Links With Only Sites That Are Contextually To Your Product Or Service.

Here's why: This is a big deal. The popularity of link to raising and its successful application can not be denied, however search engines are getting smarter every day and those web sites that subscribe to or follow the link farm mentality are going to get hammered in a big way very shortly.

The key to making a link trade strategy work for your web site so that you gain Link popularity or "PR" and increased search engine rankings is to trade links only with other web sites that are somehow related to the theme of your web site.

For example, if you were a web hosting company it would make sense to trade links with e-commerce, web design, graphic design, software and even other web hosting companies. It would not make sense to trade links with florists, car dealers, online gaming sites, casinos,etc. See the point?

Now, I know some people will disagree and say that "A links a link. It doesn't matter where it comes from." That may be true for now.....

BUT Google in particular has been making noises about revising it's algorithm to take the linking sites "theme" into account when determining it's importance when linked to your site.

What this means is that you could spend months getting thousands of non-theme link partners all pointing your site in an effort to boost your Google PR, only to wake up one day and find that all those NON-THEMED links are now worthless!

So be prepared, if you're going to build a network of link partners (and you should) take the time to do it right and make sure that those links are RELATED to your sites theme in someway.

You'll still get important PR and should Google decide to make this change, (and we think they will) you're ranking and PR will remain, while those of your competitors who took the easy way will get decimated!

Always use the proper meta-tags on your web pages. (If you don't know what meta-tags are, they are the basic instructions that tell search engines what your site is about. Meta-tags include title, description, and keywords.)

Your account with SEPT makes it easy for you to create properly formatted meta-tags that you can quickly cut and paste into your website.

To use the meta-tag creator just log into your account and click on the meta-tag creator link under the tools menu.

Here The RULE'S For Creating ALL Your Web Pages:

Your Title Tag should be 60 characters long and should include as many keywords that describe your website as possible. Too often people waste the title tag with the name of their company.

You've got plenty of room to brag about yourself on the page, but it's important for the search engines to know exactly what your site is about. The title tag is a perfect place to start.

Your Description Tag should be no more than 180 characters long. It too should describe your site simply and without a lot of fluff.

Using terms like, "We're #1!" is a foolish waste of this valuable screen real estate. Instead use as many of the keywords or key phrases as you can that describe your site.

For example, if you sold hot sauce a poorly written description might read like this: "We make the best tasting hot sauce in Texas. People love the hot spicy flavor. Order yours today." A much better description tag for hot sauce might read: "Hot sauce made from the finest hot peppers and chilies, and the freshest vegetables. Our Texas hot sauce is the winner of the Texas hot sauce chili cook-off four years running." Get the idea?

Your Keywords and the correct selection of them can make all the difference in the world as to whether or not you drive traffic to your website.

You want to pick keywords that not only describe your website or your product, but also keywords that are not being used by everyone else in your industry.

After all, it doesn't do you any good to use the keyword hot sauce if there's 100,000 other website's also using that keyword. Oh sure, you'll get listed, but you might be on page 55 instead of 1-10 on the search engines. Not to worry though, SEPT has a special keyword creator tool that allows you to discover keywords that are actually being used by people every day when looking for your product.

It also tells you which keywords have the most competition, and which keywords to avoid. You can find the keyword creator under the tools menu in your SEPT account.

For more tips on how you can get the most out of your search engine promotion, Do It Yourself Submission Try SEPT™