Tips to increase your site's pagerank

I am a web developer. I design, develop, code web sites.

My wife…she is a blogger.

Nope she is not a pro-blogger. Not even a techie. But for the past 6 months, she is seriously into blogging.

So when she kept on asking me about SEO, pagerank, driving traffic, etc, I just decided to make a post out of it.

Plain and simple, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is all about the techniques involve in having popular search engines display your site’s URL in the most coveted first pages of its search results page when a user search for a particular keyword.

There are a lot of myths and urban legend on how to effectively employ SEO, but for the beginner (read: my wife), I listed some tips or guidelines taken from the best possible source, Google (Note: for a full and detailed guideline visit Google Webmaster Guidelines):

1. Have other relevant sites link to yours.
2. Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites
3. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
4. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
5. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
6. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
7. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
8. Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
9. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
10. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
11. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
12. Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
13. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
14. Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
15. Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc.
16. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
17. Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
18. Don't send automated queries to Google.
19. Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
20. Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
21. Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
22. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
23. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.