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One of our very successful SEO friends asked me to share this…

Where a keyword appears in the text can be as important as how often you use it.

Try to place over 50% of your keyword usage in the first couple paragraphs of the body text without stuffing (55% to 75% is typically ideal). This can be tricky, but well worth the effort.

If, for example, you used "New Hampshire real estate" as a keyword phrase seven times throughout the page, try to break it down like this:

4 mentions in the first two paragraphs

2 mentions in the next paragraph or two

1 mention in a paragraph toward the bottom of the page

Natural Text Flow

Please keep in mind that it’s becoming more and more important to try to keep your text in a natural language sort of flow.

Many search engines are on the look out for blocky sentences and phrases that are not combined in a natural order.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know which keywords are the most popular before you choose them? You can. This is a really cool tool. Read the instructions below andclick on the link provided.

Overture’s keyword selection tool is the ultimate spy tool. Just enter any term that you wish to research. You will be shown how many searches were done for that and similar terms for the last month. Similar terms are typically those that include your actual search term as a portion.

Overture’s tool was created for people trying to determine the popularity of a keyword for the purpose of bidding on that word.

Another Fantastic Keyword Research Option

For a reasonable fee, you can use a fantastic keyword-tracking tool called Word Tracker.

Word Tracker will not only tell you how popular your chosen keyword is, but it reveals your competition to you as well.

They offer a free trial, which I recommend trying if you are interested in saving a lot of time and research effort.

As a regular author on a leading SEO specialty blog (SEOPartner.com), I have the unique opportunity of corresponding with some of the greatest search engine optimization minds on the planet. Many of them provide outstanding tips. Recently I came across ten that could make or break your ranking. I’ve been given permission to share them in this article, so here we go…

Buyer Beware! Choose your web hosting company carefully. Be aware of the following:
1. Avoid free hosting, since search engines don’t like it.
2. Make sure the IP address of your future server is static, meaning that it doesn’t change over time. Some top engines don’t like changing IP’s due to numerous technical problems that often result.
3. Don’t host with companies that host banned websites, such as spammers or pornography. Search engines might penalize, or ban you for being associated with such sites.
4. If you are seriously considering getting good search engine rankings, you need to have a private static IP address.

Linker Beware! Watch for the following scams and pitfalls when reciprocal linking (a.k.a. doing a link exchange):
5. A site might link back to you, but then get rid of the link, or move it to a different part on their site, that isn’t ranked as highly.
6. A Webmaster might place a “rel=nofollow” attribute in his ling to you, which makes a spider ignore the link when crawling the page.
7. Your link might be placed on a link page that exists on the site’s server, but doesn’t have a link from the actual site to it. That way a spider is highly unlikely to reach it. And if it does, due to manual submitting for example, it will not give it a high rank, no matter how popular the main page is.
8. Some webmasters will point the link to a script on their page that will redirect to your site. Since spiders don’t read scripts, this link is useless SEO-wise.
9. When purchasing links, some sites will place the link on every page of their site. Google has recently begun ignoring such schemes.

Think Before You Link…Most current search engines analyze your inbound links before considering them. Many will give links that contain a string after "?" only a fraction of their normal importance, since these are often used in commercial affiliate linking. URLs with longer strings may even be ignored entirely.

Search engines work hard to ensure people cannot buy link popularity through offering affiliate promotions, or purchase advertising on other sites.

10. If your website is dynamic, it might make sense to create a separate page for each logical section of your site, rather than using URL string identifiers.

These tips came from some of the best SEO pros I have ever dealt with. For any of them who may be reading this I offer my sincere thanks for sharing this incredible information.

We have added ten more great resources for you to check out. We now have over 50 great Xtras!

OK, I just got an email asking “How can an seo company guarantee me top placement? Is that even possible? I mean, they don’t control the search engines, so I don’t get it.”

My response is this – Good point! It’s been my experience that most companies offering a “guarantee” are really offering more of a warranty – meaning that you would not pay full price unless you received what they agreed to provide. This, in my opinion is a fair business practice.

The guarantee or warrantee is typically a number of “top 30 rankings in five or more top search engines” or something to that effect. But buyers should be aware that the “top” rankings might be for useless keywords that were easy to rank for, such as your company name (which is often the domain name that could have been typed in directly without need of a search engine). This is just something to be aware of when agreeing to the search terms they guarantee.

Mark your keywords by putting bold, italics, or underlined tags around them. Note that it is better to use instead of for this purpose.

Always try to have a minimum of 100 visible words on each page, but having 250-300 is even better. Some engines penalize your page if it lacks textual content.

Keep in mind that while image tables are easy to use and organize, they are harder to optimize. Exchanging them for CSS positioning often allows far more control during SEO.

Search Engine spiders don’t click buttons, so if you are using them as links, be sure to provide an alternative for the bots to reach your pages. JavaScript isn’t good for your links either. This especially concerns navigation lists, menus, and such. However, it is completely normal to use it for image rollovers in your navbar.