1. Choose a keyword related to your content for your web page.  Remember that your web page and your website are not ranked as one.  Your web page will be ranked of its own accord.
2. Write unique and relevant content related to that keyword.
3. Use that keyword in your title tag.
4. Use that keyword in a header tag.  Preferably an <H1> tag.
5. Use words and phrases related to the keyword you chose and use them throughout the content of your web page.
6. Write a description for the web page that contains the keyword you have chosen.
7. Do not keyword stuff your web pages.  (Keyword stuffing means that you use the same keywords multiple times throughout the content of your page).
8. Do not use underhanded techniques in order to get better rankings in the search engines.  This is oftentimes referred to as “black hat SEO” or even “gray hat SEO”.
9. Within the content, link to another page on your site using keyword-focused anchor text.
10. Do not submit your web page to link farms.  Link farms are website set up specifically for the purpose of allowing anyone to post links.
11. Do not purchase links to point to your website.
12. Do not link out to bad neighborhoods.  Bad neighborhoods are:  link farms, known spam sites, gambling sites, porn sites, phishing sites or hacker/cracker sites.
13. Do not engage in linking schemes.  Linking schemes are those schemes created specifically for the purpose of gaining more links to your site.
14. If you must use reciprocal linking, keep it to a minimum.  Reciprocal linking is the act of trading links with another website.
15. Don’t use hidden text on your web pages.
16. Don’t use hidden links on your web pages.
17. Link to well-known high-quality web sites.
18. Always create a sitemap for your website.
19. Submit your sitemap to the search engines.
20. Use an RSS feed for your website.  This will allow people to get notified whenever you update your website.
21. Do use a blog on your site and update it as necessary.
22. Use content from article directories only when absolutely necessary.
23. Do continually add unique and updated content on your site.
24. Do use a robots.txt file for your site.
25. Lastly, remember that your website is for your site visitors first and foremost and the search engines second.

For more information on proper SEO techniques including generating traffic to your website, visit the Bonehead SEO Course.

1. intitle – intitle:keyword – If you want to know what web pages are optimizing for a keyword phrase you’re considering, type intitle:yourkeyword in the Google search box.  This will return to you a list of web pages that are using that keyword in their title – an important on-page SEO technique.  If you’re looking for a particular keyword phrase in the title use quotes like this:  intitle:”Keyword Phrase Goes Here”.  And finally if you want to see who isn’t optimizing their pages at all, just for fun, try intitle:”Untitled Document”.  You can also use this for a specific command we talk about below called site.  To see the web pages that are optimizing their title for a certain keyword or keyword phrase within their site then use:  intitle:”Keyword phrase” site:nameofsite.com.
2. inurl – inurl:keyword – If you want to know what URLs contain a specific keyword phrase in their URL (web address) then simply type inurl:keyword.  If you’re looking for a phrase in their URL then type inurl:”keyword phrase”.  Note that this will pull back the pages on a website that contain this phrase in their entire URL including any web pages within their site.
3. inanchor – inanchor:keyword – If you want to know what web pages contain a specific keyword within their anchor text on their page, then simply type in inanchor:keyword.  If you’re looking for a specific keyword phrase, use quotes: inanchor:”keyword phrase”. Alternatively if you want to find a link on a specific web page that contains certain keywords, you’d then type in: inanchor:”keyword phrase” site:nameofsite.com.
4. site – site:nameofsite.com – If you want to see how many pages of a website are indexed in the search engines then type in site:nameofsite.com.
5. link – link:nameofsite.com – If you want to know how many links are pointing to a site you can enter in link:nameofsite.com.  Note that Google is notorious for not giving you all of this information to take it with a grain of salt.
6. filetype -filetype:file_extension.  If you want to know how many web pages have a certain filetype extension you can type in filetype:fla for example.   This will show you all of the pages indexed with the .fla extension.  A great way to see how well Google is indexing flash.  Also try filetype:pdf.  This also works well with the site search.  If for example you wanted to locate a pdf file on a certain website you’d then enter filetype:pdf site:nameofsite.com.
7. intext – intext:Keyword – the intext command allows you to find all web pages that contain a certain keyword within their text.  intext:keyword.  You can also use this with the site command as well to search for a specific word or phrase within a websites text: intext:keyword site:nameofsite.com.  Use quotes to search for a phrase intext:”keyword phrase”.
8. cache – cache:nameofsite.com.  If you want to see the last cached version of a web page or site type in cache:nameofsite.com.