Everyone is an SEO ‘n00b’ at one time or another and for me it was about 18 months ago. Whilst learning you hear certain things over and over again making you believe that they are true, however as I soon found out many of them wernt. You may think im stupid having 10 SEO Tips that Ill never change no matter what anybody says, but hey thats just me and I go by what Ive seen work with my own eyes and my own tests so here they are:

1. Keywords in the Title Tag, get your main keywords for that page in the title tag
2. non-www to www 301 Redirect. OK so you can tell Google which one you prefer but I would rather not have too and kill two birds with one stone
3. Keywords in the Footer. I always believe having a small section of text in the footer with the keywords that you are optimising for is important as its the ‘last thing the Spider sees’
4. Great Navigation. This includes a Sitemap, good footer navigation and deeplinks to other pages in your site from some of your main and more ‘authoritative’ pages
5. H Tags. Im not sure how long these will be effective but Im still seeing results with them. It kind of helps me in terms of the design purpose setting h1 at the top of the page and h2 as sub headings
6. Be Involved in the Community. What? Didnt expect this one? Well I value it very strongly. If you are going to get big in your niche you must be an active member in your community to get people to notice and respect you, even give you a little link love.
7. Follow the Web. I cant give any better SEO Tip then to stay active on SEO Forums and Read SEO Blogs then to actually do that. Remember that not everyone gives great advice so test things out for yourself.
8. Backlinks. Of course you expected this one to come up, or did you? No matter how good the ‘AI’s’ get for noticing quality content backlinks are still going to show what people are talking about or caring about on the web. Even if the bar does get raised in terms of their quality guidelines
9. Good Content goes a long way. Ill always believe in content, its what people remember, learn from and even link too if your lucky. Its what the web is revolving around and what people use to make money. Content is content and content is king.
10. Do Nothing for the SE’s. OK maybe I should expand this a little. I put my titles in <h1> tags in order to hopefully show a little more importance but I dont do it for them, I do it for me to rank higher and get more traffic ;). Keep your real website visitors in mind at all times and you cant go far wrong

Of course, nobody in this industry can or should guarantee rankings for any keywords, or a certain amount of traffic coming via the Search Engines, so how do you bring trust into your Search Engine clients? Well I guess its something I’ve learn over the years as sadly a lot of people still see SEO as a ‘dark art‘ and less about the technical work done (that 5%). Therefore clients should be assured that:

• You wont perform any actions that might get them banned from Search Engines
• You will work to only increase Search Engine Rankings and not the other way around
• You will respect their brand in the process
• You wont allow competitors to know their SEO Company (for some clients)
• You will give them the option to leave at any time if they arent seeing results after X months

Although these may sound a little rediculous, its sometimes all the client needs to hear instead of them putting the words in your mouth. Tell them upfront what they need to hear, its not a sales pitch its actually what WE and YOU should do with your SEO Clients. Remember they may think highly of their brand and feel they are risking it in the hands of another business, let them know how you will ensure brand reputation is kept  and how your work will be insider only. Tell them!

This is a small-ish list out of a huge list of things that I wish Google would do or / change.

1. Google reader show the exact number of feeds to read rather than (100+)
2. Allow Searching in Google Reader
3. Stop asking whether a user meant the search term with a z in it when searching from the UK (Optimisation / Penalisation etc)
4. If somebody refers to an article with a similar title, allow the source to rank higher
5. Stop Ranking Digg pages higher than the actual source or reference
6. In Google Reader stop marking read items as new multiple times
7. De-Index all SEO companies that guarantee Top 10 Results in Google
8. Put back the option to turn off personalised results from the Search Page
9. Show all known links with the ‘link:’ command
10. Give Matt Cutts a pay rise
11. Stop reading email content just in order to show targetted ads (do that by the sites I visit if you so wish)
12. Allow the changing of Gmail Usernames
13. Remove the Google logo from Adsense Ads
14. Look at your own results for the likes of ‘Buy Viagra’ to find the heart of spam

Have more? Leave them in our comments and if we agree well add them to the list

Donna Fontenot, also known as DazzlinDonna is the author of the popular blog at SEO-Scoop, and enjoys working on her own websites. Being one of the most known women in the industry, we invited Donna for an interview.

Hey Donna, and thanks for taking the time out to answer our questions. We won’t waste more of your time so we will get right into it!

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Yesterday I was intrigued enough by the Title of an Entrepreneurs-Journey blog post that I had just to click on it from my feed reader, “The Top 16 SEO Tips from a Yahoo Insider”, you can find the tips on the blog post but here’s my personal run down of the tips and my opinions.

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