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Note: This isn’t a 10 steps to outranking your competitor article. This isn’t an article to get you to purchase any software or a service from an SEO Consultant. I don’t provide these services I just post about what I have learned over the year from running websites. Here you will find the basic things you can do you your site to properly SEO it and make it easier for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all the other search engines to index your content and properly assign value to your pages.

Links
The most important thing you can do to increase your ranking in search engines is to build back links to your website and your individual pages. This is something that Google especially loves to use when factoring in your ranking in their SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Back links can be accuired through many avenues such as Directories (relevant category and one way non reciprocal linking.), Social networking sites (Digg, Netscape, Reddit MySpace, Facebook) and word of mouth. The word of mouth is the most powerful way which you can really see take effect when you hit the main page of Digg.com. You can acquire thousands of backlinks within days just from people spreading your link to other sites or posting about it on theirs.

Robots.txt
Goal of the robots.txt is to keep search bots out of areas of your site that you don’t want them to be in. You want to use robots.txt to remove duplicate content by not allowing robots to access it in the first place. If you have an archive, printthread pages, or other pages that present the same content I recommend disallowing it via robots.txt. The Robots.txt file always goes in the root of the site, unless you run subdomains, in which case you place it in the root of your subdomain.

One trick is you can go to many sites and add robots.txt to the url and view their file to see how they have theirs setup.

On Page SEO
The big thing to make sure you do here is have plenty of content with your keywords repeated throughout the content as much as possible but only where it would make sense for you to add those keywords. We want to have a good SEO’d site but we don’t want to scare everyone off at the same time. It is possible to find a balance between user friendly pages and SEO friendly pages. I would recommend that you use CSS to design your site in a way that your content appears as high up on the page as possible. You want the search engines to see your content as quickly as possible.

Duplicate URLs
The worst offenders of Duplicate URLs are forums and shopping cart software that use many different parameters in urls to present a page. vBulletin has many issues out of the box with having many urls for the same content. The easiest and most efficenet way at removing these duplicate urls is using mod_rewrite. The goal is to have one url for one page of unique content. This way search engines have no guess work in which url to include in the SERPs and how to apply many of their ranking algorithms to that link to determine the amount of weight it is given.

Conclusion
In the end SEO is going to be something different for each site. It depends on the software you use what you need to concentrate on improving. I deal with forums and wordpress blogs so I know exactly what to do to every vBulletin forum and wordpress installation I run to properly optimize it. No one knows your site better than you do so you can take the things highlighted in this article and apply them to your site to see where you can improve your SEO. Hope you found this useful.

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