You’re probably sick of hearing it, but it’s true: you need good, original, relevant content on your website to move up the search engine rankings, and you need to update your site on a regular basis. Whether you write the content in-house or outsource it, keep in mind how people behave when surfing the web. Your text should be broken up into digestible chunks, given plenty of white space around it, and supplemented with pleasing graphics.

Other good web content tips include using short lists whenever possible, using relevant anchor text for your links, and avoid obnoxiously flashing graphics. Check out the screen shot from part of a page off Ars Technica website to see a good example of how a website should read.

Because keeping a website updated with new content is so important, many webmasters choose to outsource this job in order to be able to concentrate on other aspects of the business. Hiring a freelancer can work well as long as you make your requirements clear and have good communication back and forth with the freelancer.

The takeaway from all this is that content creation isn’t just a sideline, but an integral part of your SEO plan. So if you’re not prepared to regularly create good content and don’t have a staff member who can devote the time it requires, then you should really consider outsourcing. With good, fresh, relevant content, your site’s PageRank and position in the search engine results will steadily increase.

There are several levels of research on your competitors that you can do effectively on your own. The first level of research is simply getting a pen and some paper and “crawling” the site yourself while making notes on structure, anchor text, and navigation. This is a way to get fresh ideas about your own site’s navigation, anchor text, and structure.
If you want to dig a little deeper, look at the html source for a competitor’s page. Usually ctrl+u will get you this information, or it will be under the “Tools” menu. Look for well-made title tags, H1, H2, and H3 headers, and a regular smattering of nofollow tags. These are signs that they know their SEO.

You can download a free back link analyzer like the one from SEObook. Using this, you can analyze, say, the top hundred back links by PageRank and Alexa Rank. All you have to do is load them into a spreadsheet and order them that way. This lets you see where their best links are from. If there are bunches of back links from one domain, the competitor probably owns that domain. Figure out where your best bets are for finding your own back links, and start asking. You’ll probably get at least a few good back links this way.

In early 2009 Google started giving more weight to brands when it came to search engine results. Quite naturally, a lot of people predicted doom for organic search results. Fortunately, any damage to unique, high-quality non-”brand” content appears to be minimal so far. The ones who have suffered have mostly been those with thin affiliate sites – sites that have very little actual content but push affiliate programs.

Google’s goal in doing this was to keep the first SERP from being dominated by low-content sites. It is easy to see how some people would fear that SEO suddenly wouldn’t matter anymore, if you were going to search on, say, boots and have a first results page dominated by Uggs, Kenneth Cole, Kate Spade, and Tod’s. This wouldn’t do you much good if you wanted work boots.

But what seems to have happened is that there is more of an eclectic mix on the first SERP with searches on broad keywords, like health insurance. You can see in the three screen shots that the first results page has a mix of sponsored sites, big brands, informational pages, news results, and book results. The sky hasn’t fallen yet, but those who run hundreds of thin affiliate sites may want to be looking over their shoulders.

Web design isn’t what it used to be, and thank heaven for that. You don’t have to be an HTML expert to design great websites today. There are technologies like Ajax, Flash, and PHP that make website development go easier. But you have to be careful when using Flash, however, because the search engine bots have a hard time knowing what to make of sites that heavily use Flash.

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.

Having the best text content is still of major importance in the world of SEO, but multimedia (which is usually translated as “video) content can be used to boost your search engine results too, if you go about it right.

Your best strategy is to use original video on your site. If you do this, you may want to consider using a service that lets you include keywords and title in the embed code so that the search bots can find it more easily. Veeple (veeple.com) is one such service. Barring that, however, you can embed video from other sites, as long as you add value to that video by including related, original content such as a transcript or a review of the video.

Using original video or adding value to non-original video is the best bet for cracking those elusive first page Google “Video results for (whatever)” spots that you see more often these days.

With text, images (properly tagged) and video, you can pursue a more comprehensive approach to search engine optimization, and a multi-pronged, well balanced strategy is going to do the most for your site over the long haul.

When it comes to free web analytics, there are several choices. Four favorites are Onestatfree.com, Google Analytics, Piwik, and GoStats, each of which you can see in the accompanying screen shots. In each case, using the analytics software is a matter of registering, copying a snippet of code, and pasting it into the source code for the page you want to track. You can track something as simple as how many visitors per day you get to complex information like conversions and percentage of goals reached.

Google Analytics is the most elaborate and feature-laden of the bunch, and it’s all free, whereas for some of the other programs, you have to pay to upgrade to get premium features. But Onestatfree, Google Analytics, Piwik, and GoStats are all easy to use and set up. For most people, convenience and ease of use will be the factors that influence how much use you get out of any web analytics software. There will also be a certain amount of discipline you’ll have to get used to in order to make the most of your analytics. But once you learn to use the numbers to your advantage, you’ll be more motivated than ever to get your site in order and optimize it so you can reach all your goals for your website.

Google is starting to use real-time search results, including Twitter tweets relevant to search words, which means your tweets could show up on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP)! You can see this in the screen shot of a Google search on “iPad.” The tweets themselves are indexed, and the first 40 or so characters of your Tweet (depending on how long your username is) will make up the title tag when your tweet shows up on Google search results, so choose the first two or three words of a tweet carefully, including at least one important keyword for your website.

In your profile, make sure there’s a link to your actual website, not just your Facebook or MySpace page. Use your profile’s bio line, which is 160 characters, to your best advantage by making it relevant to your website and using keywords. Your bio is indexed, and what’s in your bio is what will or won’t give your Twitter profile its relevance. Additionally, your Twitter bio is your meta description, so make it count.

When you develop followers, don’t abandon them. Make sure to engage them and don’t just use your tweets to constantly push your products on people.

Every keyword in your Google AdWords account has associated with it a Quality Score. The Quality Score is a way to tell whether a keyword is relevant to the ad itself, and relevant to search queries. There are many factors that go into an individual keyword’s Quality Score. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the higher the position where your keyword will trigger ads, and the lower that keyword’s associated cost-per-click. Therefore, you want your keywords’ Quality Scores to be as high as possible.

The overall Google Network is made up of the Search Network and the Content Network. Your ads will appear on the Search Network if you have so chosen this in your campaign settings. In these cases, the user’s search query words determine where the ads are targeted. These are the ads that show up in a column next to search engine results, like the ones seen in the screen shot. The higher the keywords’ Quality Scores, the higher ads show up in these columns.

As for the Content Network, the eligibility of your ad to show up on a particular content site, and its location on that site are determined by your keyword’s Quality Score for content, which is based on past performance of your ad on this site, and on similar sites. The Quality Score for Content is also based on relevance to the keywords and those of the ad group on this site.

Using the Google Keyword Tool, and optimizing your ads so that they are highly keyword-specific will help boost your keywords’ Quality Scores.

There are lots of ways that webmasters can assess the health of their websites using Google Webmaster Tools. One good tip is to use a text browser like Lynx to look at your site. That’s because most search crawlers “see” pretty much what Lynx does. If your site’s full up with JavaScript, cookies, and Flash, crawlers might have a hard time crawling your site.

It’s also a good idea to find out if your server supports the HTTP header “if-then-modified.” With it, your server can tell Google if your content has changed since the last crawl of the site, saving you bandwidth.

If you use the robots.txt file, you can tell crawlers which directories can be crawled, and which can’t. Google Webmaster Tools has a robots.txt analysis page that can help you determine if you’re using robots.txt correctly. That way you can prevent crawling of things like search results pages or automatically generated pages that aren’t going to add any value for users finding you via search engine.

Another great test of how healthy your site is (at least as far as Google is concerned) is how fast pages load. You can use the Page Speed tool as directed here to check.

There’s no reason not to do video optimization and submission. Applying the basics is easy and will help you move past those who can’t be bothered with doing it. It’s a lot like optimizing images and photos:

Name files accurately with keyword enriched filenames: “singing-cat-loves-our-cat-treats.avi” is better than “MOV2847-a.avi.”
Optimize the page that your video is on. Have keyword enriched (not stuffed) text before and after your video.

Submit your video to search engines.

If you submit your video site to major directories and were listed with at least one of them, then the other crawlers will be extremely likely to pick up the url for their search engine.

Create a video sitemap for Google with video-specific tags (as seen in the screen shot). It must have a link to a landing page for your video and indexing information. Several fields of the sitemap are optional, but they can help you out, so take advantage of them if you can. Click here for the basics of sitemap protocol.

When you’ve created a video sitemap, submit it to Google with Webmaster Tools. While this won’t guarantee your video page will show up in the search results, it certainly tips the tide in your favor.