Writing Text (and website pages) for Search Engines

There are a couple of basic rules when it comes to honest, "white hat" search engine optimization:

1. Each page's HTML Title tag and file name are very important (see blog post on META tags for guidelines on this);
2. Use of headers (h1) tags on pages can be important;
3. Using appropriate META tags cannot hurt and is a good idea
4. Each page that you want the search engines to index must have at least 250 plain text (not image based text) words of content copy on it
5. You should not optimize a page for more than three keywords (or keywords phrases; collectively "keywords")
6. The more pages on your website (articles, newsletters, archives, blog, etc), the better your rankings and relevancy in search engine results will be.
7. The more frequently you add new content to your website, the more frequently search engines will visit your site and update you in their index.
8. Text in flash or images is essentially unfindable/unsearchable by search engines - use it sparingly for visual impact only, and always use "ALT" tags
9. Most important of all, the more websites of value that link to you, the better your ranking/position will be in search engine results.

When you're writing those minimum 250, plain HTML text words per page, here is how you incorporate the keywords that you have researched:

Quick SEO Text Guideline Tips

• Each SEO-optimized page should be optimized for 3 related keyword search phrases, each of which should be used exactly three times on that page, each with identical spelling
• You should have at least six SEO optimized pages on your website
• Each SEO optimized page must have at least 250 plain text words on it
• Each SEO optimized page should also have it's 3 keyphrases in the page title and meta tags (those are hidden HTML code and are inserted by the programmer or content management system)

Even following the above guidelines, you still want your textual copy to be "as human readable" as possible.