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.

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

Google is rumored to use an algorithm, unofficially called the “Sandbox Algorithm” by SEO enthusiasts, that doesn’t allow most new domains to rank as highly as old ones, no matter the amount of optimization. Although the effect of this algorithm is still unproven, it is worth worrying about, just to be on the safe side. Most optimizers agree that the effect of this technique will last anywhere from 3 to 11 months, so it might make sense to set up a small temporary site a few months before getting the actual content online.

Choose your web hosting company carefully. Some of the things that may influence your SE ranking include:

1. Avoid free hosting, since search engines don’t regard it too well.
2. Make sure the IP address of your future server is static, meaning that it doesn’t change over time, since some engines don’t like it due to numerous technical problems it causes.
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. Your hosting company should provide you with this number, and you should be able to contact your site through it.

The main method of getting sites to link to you is called "reciprocal linking," or in normal words, link exchange, since this way both sites improve their link popularity. This process can be time consuming, and needs attention even after the deal is made. Here’re some examples of possible pitfalls:

1. 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.

2. A webmaster might place a “rel=nofollow” attribute in his ling to you, which makes a spider ignore the link when crawling the page.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. When purchasing links, some sites will place the link on every page of their site. Google has recently begun ignoring such schemes.

So unless you remain watchful and monitor your links constantly, you risk increasing the other sites’ ranking, but not your own.