I don’t want to make my self an expert on the search engines algorithms, since it’s a closed country. But personally I believe, if you embrace and stick to the standards and best practices, plus you have some good content and/or a great product, generating traffic and attention (incoming links), you don’t have to worry to much about SEO!

But here it comes, is my personal SEO tips and checklist, primarily from a technical perspective:

• Make sure you have a nice and friendly URL strategy. E.g.: www.website.com/soft-drinks/coca-cola instead of www.website.com/product?id=23472347. If your website is country specific, e.g. if this was a Danish website, I wouldn’t use the word “soft-drink” – instead is would use the Danish word for it.
• Focus on your TITLE-tags. Like with the URL’s, it’s important that your TITLE-tags stay relevant – don’t just have the name of your company/website as the same title for all your pages, make sure the title relates to the individual page: <title>What goes here, is very important!</title>
• Be strict around your HTML code, keep it clean, and don’t make to much noise! My recommendation is to use xHTML and CSS, it’s important to separate all the design and layout out, into your CSS file(s), this will hopefully leave your HTML code clean – stripped down as the best fat-free piece of meat you can imagine, ready for the search engines to eat (crawl)!
• And just to make sure you got the message: Use your HTML right! If you have headlines in your pages, use the proper H1-tag (<h1>Here goes the headline</h1>, don’t jump the fence and make it like this <span class=”myFancyHeadline”>My headline</span>), remember the search engine robots don’t eat design, they eat code! And don’t forget the H2, H3 etc. tags for your sub-headlines…
• I think all websites should have a sitemap, for the users to get an overview of the site. The same apply for the search engine robots: You should have a sitemap.xml file, to make sure all your pages are being exposed to the search engines – find more info at www.sitemaps.org. And don’t forget to make a pointer from your robots.txt file (if you don’t have one, make sure to make one, find more info at www.robotstxt.org) to your sitemap.xml file.
• Don’t forget your META-tags, the description and keywords are my top priorities of all the available META-tags.
• And back to the HTML again, don’t miss out on the important ALT and TITLE attributes on your images and links!
• Finally, registration of your website in DMOZ is also a good thing to do.

I hope it all makes sense. I know most of the recommendations above, primarily relates to the technical part of SEO. Of course there are a bunch of other perspectives and activities to go for, in the battle of a top spot in Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines… but in my world, this is the base you need to build upon.

One of the alternatives I have used my self, with great results – is landing pages. Landing pages are alternative pages you build, as a supplement to your primary pages. These pages are offent constructed around alternative words and synonyms, to the primary words and themes relating to your website/product. To get some insight, on what people are searching for, I can recommend Google AdWords Keyword Tool, this tool can quickly give you some pointers on what words and synonyms to focus on, in your landing pages – and hopefully this will generate some additional traffic to your website, you might never have gotten.

Finally I can also recommend an other tool from Google, their Webmaster Tools – this tool can give you some insight around what is happening behind the scene of your website as well as some stats on your placement in Google, on your keywords.

If you have feedback, comments or other good SEO tips and trick, please leave a comment.