Tip #1: Search Engine Friendly URLs

Always use search engine friendly URLs. Be sure to use hyphens and underscores in all your URLs and preferably have the URLs be the keyword that relates to the page. For example if the page is about web hosting, then the URL could be web-hosting or web_hosting.

This may not be possible in many niche markets for the more popular keywords. Therefore you can focus on creating mini-sites that are keyword based. For example if your site is about web hosting, you can create mini-sites about web hosting but with a lesser known keyword such as "low cost web hosting".

It's important to do thorough research before deciding what keywords you'll focus on when optimizing your website. I've listed below some popular tools you can use

Good Keywords (Free keyword research Software application)

The sites you deemed most important, ensure they have unique ip addresses for each site. The reason this is important is many sites on a "shared" hosting service share the same ip address. If any of these sites have been banned by the search engines, it could affect your site's ranking or even result in your site being banned as well, since it is sharing the same ip address.

Always create a site map for your site and submit the site map using Google's webmaster tools. A site map will allow the search engines to easily find all the pages within your website.

It's been shown that using H1 tags, and even H2 tags are good for optimization. Be sure you section your website's headlines in H1 tags. It's important you use CSS to power how the tags are displayed or the tag will be very big by default and could make your page look ugly. Using a css file will enable the tag to blend nicely with your design. Be sure your H1 tags are keyword rich.

For further on site optimization be sure that your menu links are keyword rich. Be creative with your menu text titles and have a few of them be actual keywords that relate to your website.

Try to limit the amount of Javascript used on your page, especially if it's being placed near the top of your website's source code. This will lower the relevance of your site's content, as the first thing the spider will see is Javascript code and not actual textual content, therefore you lose relevancy points since your main content is not loaded first on the page.

Always use meta tag description. Google actually pulls your meta tag description when spidering your website, and so does Yahoo and MSN. So it's very important that you have a well written and keyword rich meta tag description. For best results have your description less than 200 characters.

Not all search engines index meta keywords, but it's still a good idea to have a meta keyword tag just in case it's indexed or have some kind of relevance.

Many scripts by default do not utilize unique titles for each page within the script or website, therefore your site is not optimized well for high rankings. Be sure that when using a script to power your website that you have the option to have a unique Title for each page, a unique meta description, and unique keywords.

Do not *ever* repeat the same content on too many pages. If this is done, your pages could be placed in Google's supplemental results database. This is not where you want to be, so therefore ensure that

each page within your website does have unique body content.

You'll need to start having links pointing to you from relevant and popular websites. Research the websites that are your competitors who have achieved high page rank, and see what sites are linking to them, and if possible contact those websites to see if you can have a link as well. Do a search on Google for a keyword that relates to your website. Review the top ten websites, and input this tag in Google for each of the sites. Type in the search box link:www.sitename.com, replacing sitename.com with the site name you are researching. Review all the back links for that particular site and try to acquire link partnerships with the same sites as your competitors.

This tool allows you to check PR, age of websites, backlinks, edu links, gov links, page links, technorati backlinks, alexa ranking, dmoz links, yahoo directory links and provides whois information. It's a great plugin tool for firefox.

This is just a general rule since you have to have as limited downtime as possible. Always research the hosting companies carefully, since downtime can result in a site that is dropped from the search engines if they try to spider and realize that the site cannot be accessed.

Ensure you create a robots.txt file to restrict the content that can be indexed by the search engines. This can limit the "duplication" factor that can occur if you have more than one page that is similar.

I'm listing this last since many people do not like to endorse it. I'm not endorsing it, but I will mention it. You can purchase links on power sites that can help with your page rank which can aid in better rankings *if* you have a well optimized website. You have to ensure the links you purchase are actually from respected sites and preferably within a related field.