www.webmasterworld.com
By Brett Tabke

DON'T ever include a keyword or key phrase in your meta tags that is not present on that page. Keywords should REINFORCE what is on the page, not define it. I've seen this, time and time again on sites I maintain, as search engines are defining this a spam more and more of the time.
DON'T use a general (free) banner exchange service. You will see at most, a 1/50th increase in your site traffic from the banner exchange and at worst you will lose 1/10th of your traffic because they look cheap. Some people claim that a few search engines now decrease rankings if the standard banner programs are present (ie:link exchange/click trade, etc). However, there are some good banner exchanges out there for just certain topics (kinda like Webrings) that can work good to target a particular demographic audience.

Search Engine Ranking Tips: Do's

Do use high value keyword "phrases" in addition to keywords. Look for something unusual, don't just copy the competition, but do target the competition. Look at your referrals and see what combinations of words are being used together and work them into a phrase near the beginning of your keywords.
Do use descriptive short alt tags for your images - many search engines will use them (which adds to your keywords). Each search engine has different criteria for indexing your site (as detailed elsewhere; but, all don't mind the alt tags and some use them - go for it, its a free bonus)
Do check the competition. See what they are using for keywords and phrases. Check what sites are referencing them, and check what they are doing to get those referrals. Reverse searching for your competition can tell you a great deal about what your site is missing.
Do consider each page of your site as an entry point for a search engine, and watch the results for each page. Use this to your advantage as a method of steering traffic and visitors back to your main page.
Do put in a few small specific pages targeted directly at the keywords you wish to be listed under. Make one page of one paragraph that is highly descriptive including only your base keywords in the paragraph. Submit it to an engine and you'd be surprised and the results - smaller is better some times...
Do take steps to consider heavily your Strategic Web Site Submission policy before you build and submit links for the next page. Start by building the page around a new keyword list. You-guessed-it, use the page to reinforce the keywords and the keywords to reinforce the page. This is still one of the best hints to up, your site presence before you announce it to the world.
Do use at least one strange keyword as a means of testing bizarre and unrelated results. I used the word strange in this document. I assume I will get some unrelated hits based on the strange keyword, which can let me check what people are search for via referral data. If I get a few hundred hits a week based on the strange keyword, that might be an avenue to explore for a whole new page.
(post note: the word "strange" formerly was ee-xxoottiicc. It is spelled this way to keep from getting branded an aa-dduulltt content site by the search engine indexers: which happened and hits went from about 200 a day to 30. - another lesson learned. Thanks to Infoseek for the information and heads up!

For example, on of my older older pages used the strange keyword doritios. In the doc I mentioned the fact that I often have to clean my keyboard because I eat doritios while computing. The keyword Doritos pulled in unrelated surfers and allowed me to see that, hundreds of potato growers in idaho where looking for potato processing, prices, and information. Based on that fact, I added hundreds of potato and couch potato (grin) sites to my farm and ag search engine. Overall those keywords have pulled in thousands of hits to my pages. (a powerful technique not to be dismissed so quickly). Can you spot the strange keyword in this page?
Do Log the visitors web site and referring URL. This is critical information for adjusting your site keywords and phrases. Study and learn; do research on the internet for a good log analysis tool or logger program. This can do more to help your web sight placement than anything. (side bar: notice the few intentional mis-spellings in this doc? again, reinforce those keywords! Its a classic tip for the techniques and promotions column that can honestly increase and generate site traffic before and after you announce your site to the world. I find I do far more keyword and meta tag work after a page is two months old, than I did when I built the page. I usually leave 300-400 characters play room in my meta keywords just for follow up work. There be gold in that referral data!
DO mix it up. Consider every page on your site as a potential point of entry for visitors. Use some small widget, solo topic, or narrow focus pages with keywords unto themselves - and also some large heavy content pages with broad topics. With search engines constantly changing their ranking systems, one month a large content rich page will score high, while the next month that little two paragraph "after thought" page will suddenly jump to the top of the rankings for seemingly unknown reasons. You should be careful with this technique not to give the search engines the appearance of spamming (don't just replicate a page and change a little here and there - keep topics divided).

Website Promotion Things You Should Avoid: Don'ts

1. Screen Width. The formerly self-imposed 640x400 window width was the defacto standard of page design. After six months of watching logs, and checking major hit count sites, less than 10% of users now report a window that size. Certain browsers (IE) will report their screen size to the server when it connects to a web site. 640x400 (actually about 600x350 to account for browser scroll margins/title and address bar), is still doable with good page design. A major mistake is hard coding a site for 800x600 or higher pixels - be flexible, and allow your text to flow around graphics.

By using tables you can get the flexibility to make your page appear well on any size screen resolution. A good table design is one that uses Percentages instead of fixed widths. That way, a screen will look good from 640x400 all the way up to 1600x1200.

If you have two or three columns on your site, set your table widths to each percentage, and let the browser work out the display. While testing, make sure to reset your screen width a few times and reboot to make sure your display is accurate in several different browsers and widths.

I will freely admit that there are certain page setups that are extremely difficult to get to flow right under different browsers. (take these pages for example). It was a very difficult choice we made to go with this style of setup, but it has worked very well for us.

2. No Java! Notice that not a single major search engine or large commercial site on the internet uses Java. Why? It is too slow loading on most peoples systems. Even Wired Digital took it off their site. High bandwidth Java, Real Audio, or shockwave style plugins are out. Big time out (except specialty sites that can survive BECAUSE of the added content). Users that surf for information or products don't want to be distracted by site overhead. Play to the MTV attention span of a flea generation. (hey, wait-a-minute - thats me!)

3. No Flashing! Nothing drives users away, never to return, like flashing text, or abuse of animated gifs can. That scrolling banner text ranks right up their too.

4. Ban Those Banner Exchanges! Link Exchange is the great modern Internet myth of our time. I've talked to hundreds of people in-the-know about this subject, and the facts are simple - banner exchanges cost you repeat visitors in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Its like putting a DO NOT ENTER sign with a big skull and crossbones on your front door. Nothing spells Trailer Park like Link Exchange - your left wondering why your hit rate slowly fades away. It is one thing if you are getting paid for it - it is another entirely if you are giving it away.

5: Don't Abuse Images. I recently had someone ask me why their site couldn't get indexed on the search engines. I wasn't surprised when I looked at their site - 41 pages of pure images only - not a shred of text on the site. That is the worst case scenario of course, but you should keep pages under 64k (max) total graphics and text. Anything else, your losing your search engine food, and the load time is driving away users before the page ever loads.