• Avoid hidden text or hidden links
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Don’t send automated queries to Google
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages with malicious behaviour, such as phising or installing viruses, or Trojans or other bad ware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.

How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or loose. Bill Gates, Business @ The Speed Of Thought.

For most people when they think of search engine optimization they think only of bringing visitors to their site and then hopefully getting a newsletter sign-up or a sale. But part of any SEO process involves taking the information gathered from your SEO campaign and applying it to future SEO efforts to constantly improve your search results.

Knowing what visitors are doing while on your website is crucial. Can you answer the following questions about your website:

• How many visitors came to your site yesterday?
• How long did they stay and what did they look at?
• Are any of your site’s pages under performing?
• Is your sales page actually bringing in the sales, if not why not?

If you cannot answer these simple questions about your website then your ability to respond to your visitors needs is severely diminished.  How much would you pay if you could know every fact about your website and could intelligently deal with the information & feedback that it provides in a timely and cost effective manner?

By far the most popular (and free) website analytics package available at the moment is Google Analytics. The setup process is straight forward, you need a Google Account which most people already have in the form of their Gmail Account. Once you have registered with Google Analytics you will be given a piece of HTML code called a Tracking Code. You need to paste this piece of code into every page of your site that you want to track. Once Google has verified that the code is in place you will start to receive information from your site within 24 hours. Using Google Analytics you can obtain the following information:

• Site Visitors
• Page Views
• Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Site
• % of New Visits
• Traffic Sources
• Content Overview

Within each of these sections you can further drill down through the information to get even more detailed results. One of my favorite features is the map overlay function which allows you to see where users are clicking on your website.

Obviously having the above information at your fingertips would allow you to make fast, informed decisions about your website, transforming it from a static brochure into a finely tuned sales tool.

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• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser , then chances are that the search engine spiders may have trouble crawling/seeing your site as well.
• Allow search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behaviour, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may or may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since it last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the search engine crawler. Go to http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
• Make sure that your content management system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages to other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

So far in this series of posts we’ve covered How Google Ranks Your Site, SEO Basics, and SEO Design & Content Guidelines.  This post gives you some more advanced SEO insights to consider during the design & development stage of your website. In the next post I’ll discuss SEO quality guidelines basic & advanced.