Top 10 List of SEO

I think it is possible to list the most important elements in optimizing a web page (or web site for that matter) for search engines. Here are my top 10. Feel free to list yours or correct mine. They are not in order from most important to least important.
Top 10 Tips to SEO
1. Find out what keywords from your service and industry web site visitors are using in the search engines. If you manufacture blue, red and green widgets, find out if people are searching with those terms or if they are using big, medium and little widgets instead.
2. Optimize your web site’s Title tags. These are HTML scripted tags that appear in between the open HEAD and closing HEAD tags on your web page. Place your researched keywords in these Title tags because search engines count that tag as one of the most important on-page factors in ranking your page for the keywords it is optimized for. The Title tag is predominantly displayed in search engine results; is the first line of the result and is usually the link to your web page.
3. Optimize your web site’s Meta description tags. These also are HTML scripted tags that appear in between the open HEAD and closing HEAD tags on your web page. The Meta description tag is often shown in search engine results as one or two sentences that briefly explain what the web page is about. Place your page’s keywords in the description tag and write it as a grammatically correct sentence so searchers can get an idea of your page’s content.
4. Optimize your web site’s Meta keywords tags. These fit in between your web page’s open HEAD and closing HEAD tags on your web page. Many web page optimizers say this tag can be left out because the search engines no longer take it into consideration due to past spamming techniques that abused this tag. Directory managers, however, can use the keywords Meta tag to help place your web site in their directory.
5. When creating a web page for the first time, utilize one of the most important keywords or phrase for the page name. You will know what keywords are important for the page’s content through the research you conducted when you performed #1 above. If you are using more than one keyword, separate the words with a hyphen (dash) and use no more than three keywords for the name of the page. See an example in #6 below.
6. When creating a sub-folder in your web site, use a keyword or phrase in naming the folder. For example, if you sell widgets and you have pages on red widgets in a different folder than pages on blue widgets you might want the names of the folders to match the names of the pages. It would look something like this for a business web site named Widgets For All: www.widgetsforall.com/common-widgets/small-red-widgets.html.
7. Take advantage of the alt image attribute in HTML scripting. The ‘alt’ term stands for ‘alternate’ and was originally built into HTML scripting so that persons who didn’t want their browsers to display graphics could get a description of the image instead, hence ‘alt’. Search engines read the attribute (also known as the alt tag) and it is appropriate to place a keyword or phrase in the attribute. Don’t stuff it, use no more than five words if possible and have it make sense.
8. Make sure your web pages load quickly. While many people in the United States have high-speed Internet connections, search engine spiders (also known as robots) take into consideration the page’s size in kilobytes. If it takes a long time for your web page to load, the search engine’s spider will not travel through it (known as spidering a page or web site) and then your page will not rank for the keywords it has been optimized for. In addition, web pages that take a long time to load will probably not have many human viewers. There are too many other pages available on the World Wide Web for someone to wait during the time it takes for yours to load.
9. Make a plan to get links from web sites that carry authority in the search engines. These are established web sites that have been around quite awhile and have many web sites linking to them. A good example is MSN’s home page or Adobe’s home page. While it would be extremely difficult to receive a link from them, they carry the weight and have been established long enough to represent those kinds of web sites to seek out for an inbound link.
10. Have web sites that are linking to yours use your keywords in their links. Using the widgets example above, ask the web site owner you seek a link from to use something like this: A good source for red widgets is Widgets For All. The words,’ red widgets’ in the previous sentence would be the link that points to www.yoursite.com/common-widgets/small-red-widgets.html.