-The Title Tag-

Perhaps the most important tag on a web site, as far as search engine rankings go, is the < Title > tag. This tag provides the description that appears at the top of the browser window in order to let an Internet user know where they are. Because this tag is also used as the official "Title" of your web site in most search engine results, it also provides one of your best chances to entice a web surfer to visit your site. For both search engine optimization and marketing purposes, the Title tag should be a richly-written, keyword dense sentence that accurately describes the content of that particular web page.

A common practice is to use the Title tag to list the name of the company or web site. Not only does this tell the visitor very little about the content of that particular page, it also does nothing to tell the spider what type of content your page contains. Each and every page of a web site should have a unique hand written title. The Title tag should be focused on describing the content of that particular web page in a keyword rich manner.

For example, the title "High Tides" for a restaurant in Flagler Beach is unlikely to be either informative to the casual surfer, or to deliver keyword rich text for the search engine to rank your site for. A much better title would be "Flagler Beach Florida Restaurant Featuring Seafood and Steaks-High Tides" The new description not only provides keyword rich content to the spider, it also offers a much more detailed description to potential customers browsing through search results.

-Link Popularity and Link Building-

With so much attention being paid to Google's Page Rank (PR) system, it's no wonder that one of the first things webmasters want to learn about when optimizing their site, is link popularity and how it can impact their web site's search engine rankings. Although it is true that the number and quality of links to your site plays an important role in the way that Google (and even some other search engines) rank your web site, this is not the only reason to be concerned about building link popularity.

The reality is that Google could drop this method of ranking at any moment, so focusing on building links solely as a means to rank well in Google isn't really the best reason to work on link building. Even apart from its impact on your search engine rankings, link building plays two other vitally important roles for a web site that each webmaster should consider when starting a link building campaign.

Perhaps the most obvious reason to build links is for the traffic that they can send to your web site. Before search engines even existed, hyperlinks were the primary method of moving from one page to another on the Web. Webmasters recognized quality sites that had something to offer to their own visitors and placed links to those sites on their own web pages. Web site visitors used those links to find their way to other valuable content on the Internet. Even today, a large portion of Internet users navigate from one site to the next via links. By seeking out web sites that offer complimentary products or information related to your own site and linking to them, you are offering a service to your visitors and enhancing their experience at your site.

The other reason, and the one that is more important in terms of SEO, is because a good link building campaign will help your site get indexed more quickly and more completely by the major search engines, even those that you might be tempted to pay for inclusion with. Spider-based search engines like Google, Alta Visa and FAST/AlltheWeb find new sites to include in their directory by following links. Nearly all of the major search engines use the popular directories (Yahoo!, DMOZ, GoGuides) as a starting point for finding new sites. Getting your site listed in these directories is a great way to get your site listed in the search engines. Additionally, while some spider-based search engines, like Inktomi, have a paid inclusion option, they will still include your web site for free if they find it on their own. By working on building links to your web site, you'll eventually get yourself in front of one of these spiders and will find yourself listed in the most popular search engines without ever paying a dime.