so i’ve spent the last week or so reading up on the most recent seo articles and i’ve learned a lot. a lot of people had a lot of different things to say, but the majority of them all pretty much said the same thing. there is no trade secret. there are no tricks. achieving a favorable ranking for the right search terms can mean a steady stream of targeted traffic to your site for free. it’s all about structuring your website correctly, including plenty of content that is relevant to your keywords and making sure your website is spider-friendly. here are a bunch of pointers i learned from a bunch of different articles and seo podcasts:
your website has a theme to it. 
your site deals with a theme which is obvious from the text on the home page and reinforced by your readers. all individual pages should refer to each other and deal with various aspects of your theme. the text on your home page should clearly state the theme while the pages reinforce that theme.
your web pages should have plenty of high quality, relevant content. spiders come to your site looking for content. if a page doesn’t have much content, the page probably won’t be indexed or rank well. search engines love quality content and lots of it. that’s what searches search for and that’s what search engines want to provide.
your site’s navigational structure is relatively flat. you don’t want important pages to be too deep within your site. let everything be accessible with 1-3 clicks at the most. search engines typically index the home page first, then gradually index other pages on a site over time. spiders are programmed to only go three layers deep, even if your important content is bured deeper than that.
you’ve created a unique title tag for each page. the title is one of the most important aspects of any web page from an seo standpoint. don’t use a generic title for all your pages. use the keywords targetting that page and keep it brief and descriptive at the same time.
you use the description meta tag. your description should contain a highly descriptive sentence about your content and contains your most important keyword phrase early in the sentence.
you use the keywords meta tag. having a short list of the keywords you’re targeting will help you write appropriate content for each page. the keyword tags should contain your targeted keyword phrase and common variations, common misspellings and related terms. make sure your keywords relate closely to the page content and tie into the theme of your site.
your keywords are included in the visible page content. preferably high up on the page. you have to achieve a balance here. you want to include keyword phrases and variations within your text, but not so many times that you appear to be guilty of keyword stuffing. the trick is to work the keywords into the text so that it reads as naturally as possible for your visitors. remember, keywords can be incorporated into any element from the header text, link text and titles, captions and alt tags and image tags.
every page of your website can be reached by search engine spiders. if your pages can’t be found, they can’t be indexed and included in search results. search engines use spiders to explore your website and index the pages.
you’ve included a site map. unless your site is small, it’s a good idea to create a site map with text links that you link to the site map from your home page. include descriptive text when possible.
you use keywords in your link text. when you create a text link to another page on your site, use that page’s targeted keywords as the text for the link. make it as descriptive as possible.
links and keywords are not hidden inside javascript or other inaccessible code. if your links use javascript to direct the user to the appropriate page or content and your content is hidden within that javascript code, the spiders will not be able to scan and access it.
you’ve optimized every important page of your website individually. don’t just optimize your index page. if you face a lot of competition it may be nearly impossible to get a top ranking for your home page, but yo ucan still get a lot of search engine traffic to your site from other pages which are focused on very specific keyword phrases.
you didn’t duplicate content. each page of your site should have unique content that distinguises it from every other page on your site. duping content or having pages that are slightly different from every other page might be seen as spamming.
provide linking instructions for those who want to link to your site. make it easier for readers to link to you.
your website is free of coding errors and broken links. errors and non-working links can keep search engine spiders from correctly reading and indexing your pages. it’s a good idea to use a web page validation utility to check your html code to make sure it’s error-free.
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