You have control over all those internal pages on your site, so why not make the most of them? There is a lot you can do from within to help your site climb the SERPs. Start by getting rid of irrelevant secondary keywords. Limit outbound links to 10 or less to keep each page sharply focused. If you have a page with way more than that many outbound links, consider dividing it into multiple pages (which you should optimize as well).

There’s a lot you can do to improve the strength of your anchor text too, like making sure your main keyword phrase shows up once on the page and in the title. You shouldn’t optimize any page for more than three keywords, and pages that are too long should probably be broken down into multiple smaller, more focused pages. And don’t stuff keywords. There are some keywords that will flow naturally onto a page with no trouble at all, but there are others that will appear “stuffed” even to the untrained eye, and these don’t help your position on the SERPs.

Nail down the on-page optimization and internal link structure, and you give your off-site optimization that much more of a boost.

A long domain name that makes sense is better than a short domain name that doesn’t. Non-hyphenated domain names are better than hyphenated ones in most cases. If you can’t get the .com top-level domain, then .net is becoming a reasonable alternative. The .org extension is a good one, but some people think of sites with this extension as being nonprofits, even though they don’t have to be.

If possible, get a good domain name before starting your site and building your brand. It’s not that easy to go back and shoehorn your site name to fit your domain, or to shoehorn your domain into your sitename. It can be done, but the results are often less than satisfactory.

• Make your landing page easy to read with white space, bullet points, and subheadings.
• Don’t ask for their life’s story in registration boxes.
• Sprinkle call to action buttons throughout the page so they don’t have to scroll all the way down (or up) to click it.
• Don’t overdo the special effects.
• Don’t give your visitors an easy way out by offering links to other pages on your site.
• Your landing page should welcome new visitors and let them know they’ve come to the right place. Its overriding aim should be to funnel them to numerous opportunities to respond to your call of action. Don’t make it difficult for them.
• As for testing the effectiveness of your landing pages, one great tip is to give different tags to each call to action button so you can see which ones are getting used the most and figure out what they have that the other buttons don’t.

Ajax is a great tool for keeping your site speedy, because it lets interactive features operate independently of the page as a whole. What that means is that the user can make a choice by ticking a box on the page and only the part of the page that is applicable to the choice will reload. You might remember the bad old days when a visitor interacting with a page required the entire page to reload. So use Ajax and make your visitors happy.

PHP is an open-source scripting language that outputs HTML. Because it is open source, people are always extending it and adding functionality, and you can do so too if you’re of a mind to. While you don’t have to become an expert on HTML, it’s not a bad idea to have some minor chops with these techniques. If nothing else, it will help you communicate your needs with your web designer more effectively.

The “don’ts” of good text links are easier to rattle off than the do’s. Don’t anchor every text link on your page with the same keyword phrase. Not only will it not read well, search engines are starting to become wise to this and penalize it. Don’t use “click here” as your anchor text all the time, because when your visitors revisit the page, they’ll be wondering, “Was this the same link I clicked on last time?” And give your visitors a heads-up if you’re about to take them to a new window or to a page where a massive download will automatically begin.

Keep your anchor text natural and relevant, and deliver what the anchor text says. Link to high quality sources, and after your blog’s been around a while, start asking those high quality sources for back links. It may take time, but the link building process done well will eventually cause your site’s influence to snowball, picking up good links and back links with less effort as your site’s stature (and hopefully profitability) grows.

You can see an example of the use of rel=”canonical” in the first screen shot, taken from Google’s Matt Cutts’ blog.

The reason this is important is that search engines confronted with duplicate content will take one version and filter out the other versions. Therefore if your site is moving to a new URL, it is possible that the wrong site will get indexed, which you definitely don’t want.

The best way to avoid the indexing problems that come along with cross-domain content duplication is to use use what are called 301 redirects. 301 status means a page has moved permanently to a new URL. An example of the use of this code can be seen in the second screen shot, which came from http://www.webweaver.nu/html-tips/web-redirection.shtml.

The two pages do not have to be totally identical. According to Google, slight differences in content will be ignored. If you are just switching servers, however, you should be able to port your URL with you making a redirect unnecessary. But if you’ve got a hot new URL, you’ll want to do either a 301 redirect or a rel=”canonical” redirect.

The H1 tag is to the search engines, like a headline is when you look at a newspaper. We trust that it’s relevant to the content in the article, and so we’re drawn in if the headline is about something we’re interested in. If the content isn’t good, and if it doesn’t have a good headline telling the search engines why it’s there, then the search engines will not rank it highly.

Therefore, if you are trying to optimize a given web page for one keyword phrase, it should appear in the H1 header. You can see an example of the html in the screen shot from the site http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/_H35n.html. The H1 tag (and the other H tags as well) tells the search engine that those are important, relevant words for that page. In other words, it is what the search robots “see” as a headline so that they will “know” what a given page is about, which can only improve your search engine ranking.