The past few years have seen a huge increase in the number of search engine optimisers preaching about the vital importance of W3C Compliance as part of any effective web promotion effort. But is compliant code really the 'Magic SEO Potion' so many promoters make it out to be?..

It is best to plot out how you'll use meta tags on a particular page before even writing the content for the page. Lots of people will write the content of the page and then try to sprinkle in keywords in the meta tags. This is an ineffective way of doing things, as it usually makes your page confusing to visitors.

Before writing content, take a minute to pick out 3-4 primary keywords. Then take another minute to write phrases from those words. Once you've done that, you can begin writing your content around the keywords..

The cost of Pay-Per-Click advertising is high and rising. Click fraud (estimated by some to be as high as 35%) just makes things worse and increases click costs. And now, more and more people are saying they do not click on sponsored ads. Why you ask? Simple, they do not trust they will get relevant information when they click on a sponsored ad versus an organic link. Web surfers now understand through personal experience that PPC ads simply go to the highest bidder pretty much without regard for relevancy. In the early days (i.e. - 3 to 5 years ago); this was not the case. Back then, relevancy mattered (Overture, now Yahoo, was a leader in this area)..

Improved search engine rank is attainable through good search engine optimization, part of which is the maximizing of your Google Page Rank through intelligent linking with other web pages. In this article we will look at the argument for attaining high listings through a linking strategy.

Google Page Rank is a buzz term at the moment since many believe it to be more important to your search engine listing than search engine optimization. If we ignore for the moment the fact that Page Rank is, in itself, a form of SEO, then there are arguments for and against that belief..

Most webmasters go totally "gaga" for top 10 rankings in Google. And for good reason, Google is the most dominant search engine on the net and will deliver the largest amount of traffic.

Even those webmasters who are fortunate enough to get No. 1 rankings for their keywords in all the three major search engines will tell you Google is the one that will deliver the majority of their traffic. Hands down.

More importantly, those same webmasters will also inform you, getting top 10 rankings in Google often means your site will prove profitable. Mainly because obtaining targeted traffic is usually your first obstacle in creating a viable online business. In other words, if you get top ten listings in Google for good searchable keywords, it is almost impossible not to earn money..

My top 10 ways to improve search engine rankings are based on 7 years of banging my head against the world wide web's search engines and reading numerous books on top 10 SEO tactics.

Let me say first of all that there are a lot of books, sources and tutorials that make promises of getting your website into the top 10 spots on the major search engines. Most of these are self promoting and the end result is that you have to hire these people to accomplish the things they say you can do on your own..

As a Web Developer and SEO consultant I deal with many existing website owners who are looking to modify or improve their website. I also deal with many people who are looking to start their web presence with a new website. Through both of these interactions there is often a common theme; a misunderstanding or an attitude. I call this a misconception of reality, as often the reality of what the Internet can actually do for the persons business and what they think it can do differ massively.

Often it is presumed that by simply owning a domain and having a website built and published on the Internet, thousands of people will magically find the website, visit it and buy their products. "If you build it, they will come" should be removed from the vocabulary as soon as possible if you are to adjust attitudes to the underlying search technology..

Ask Google - search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others.

For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn't have as much value and doesn't receive the same weight as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link - the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred..

A robots.txt file, commonly mis-represented as a robot.txt file, is a file encoded in the ANSI text format. This basically means it is a simple text file which should be created in Notepad. It controls how search engine crawlers (robots) look at your website and can be used to specify how certain areas of your site is indexed or to give instruction to specific search engines..

The Google PageRank Toolbar in SEO circles is a hotly debated item, as are most issues dealing with Google. Some say it's useless, others say it gives you a general overview of your site's standing in Google. Regardless of who is right, this Toolbar shouldn't be ignored nor worshipped, just closely watched..