1. Know what is trendy at Google, Yahoo and company

Making an effort in researching the popular keywords at popular search engines ensures that your articles are included in search results. Utilising tools such as Google Keyword Tool, Yahoo Overture Keyword Selector Tool or WordTracker can assist you in finding relevant keywords and balance them against the competition. Note that just because a keyword is very popular doesn’t necessary mean success. If there are many sites that contain those words, you competing against all of them, making it harder for your site to show up on top. And placing the keywords towards to top of your page and embed them into h1 or h2 tags improves their effect. In addition, embedding them into your page’s URL is just good seo practice.

2. Maintain a blog and get participation

The value of blogging on a consistent basis — aside from being able to share your expertise and opinions with the literate world — is that search engines will index your site more often. In addition, being an active blogger leaves your fingerprint all over the web and people will find your site by reading your posts/comments and that link back to you. For example, if you’re writing about basketball, and you participate in the important blogs in the world of NBA, having those links coming back to your site would be regarded as authority links and greatly enhance your sites page rank.

3. Leave your link and exchange links with other sites.

That includes getting links to your home page, special article pages and using your keywords as part of the anchor text. To get links, write articles and place them on other sites. Then make sure it includes a resource box or bio at the end of the article that includes your URL in the first line and something that will compel readers to come to your site in the second line, along with another link.

4. Make your visitors stay longer

That means focusing on compelling content and those areas that will encourage people to hang out longer. Interesting articles, interactive content, pictures, videos and music just to name a few. To measure sucess, use Google Analytics. You can track a multitude of variables about your site’s activity and best of all it’s free.

5. Don’t waste time and effort on email marketing

What about those newsletter sites that promise success and wealth? Forget it. There are so many highly effective spam filters and firewall, your mail won’t get to their intented target. And the few that get thru, end up in spam foders and are never read. Save your time and effort and focus on your site’s content. it pays better.

• most obvious but often ignored, name the image according to it’s content. Instead of DSC00456.jpg, call it sunset-in-italy.jpg (do not use spaces in names, use dashes instead)
• make use of the “title” attribute, adding meaningful information helps search traffic
• using the “alt” attribute is debated when it comes to SEO, but should be part of any clean web design. Just imagine your image is missing or the path incorrect, the visitor at least knows that there is supposed to be an image containing what’s described in the alt tag.
• placing ample and descriptive text around the image helps search engines index the images
• store them in separate, descriptive folder
• ensure that you’re actually hosting the images, otherwise the search referred traffic will go to the image hosting site
• never use duplicate “alt” and/or “title” tags on two or more images