It is always a good idea to use a professional marketing company to help promote your site. This ensures the greatest rate of return and that your search engine optimization tactics are ethical and effective. There are, however, some things you can do to make sure your site is getting proper exposure and ranking well. But it’s very important that you don’t overdo any aspect of optimization — manipulating the search engines for your own gain can result in penalties. Always seek the advice of a professional and ethical SEO pro before engaging in a campaign.

Here are some quick tips to help boost your rankings and grow your site on the Web.

1.) Keywords and Targeting. Before we even get started with any SEO, it is important to properly select keywords. How can you know what your site is about without proper keyword analysis? You’d be amazed at how many sites have an identity crisis and don’t rank simply because the site isn’t about any one specific topic. Take a step back from your site and try to understand your audience. What are they searching for? What information can you provide for them? Take those keywords and assign them on a page-by-page basis starting with the home page, about 3-5 keywords per page. This will allow you to write content about the keywords without making the page too diverse. The search engines favor hyper-targeted pages over pages that are too diverse in their topic. To do research on your keywords, use Google’s Keyword Tool found here. This will show you how many people are searching for your terms, and recommend possible replacements.

2.) Text Content. Now that we have keywords for our pages, we need to write proper content. Good content has between 3–5% density depending on the topic and layout of the page. The search engines base a large portion of their ranking algorithm on text content and it should be the focus of your site. Users are searching for content and you have to provide it. Generally, a good page has around 300 words. Home pages often have less; usually in the 100–200 word range. Good, well-written pages are very targeted and provide information about the keywords. The more comprehensive the page, the better it will rank. Always keep in mind that you are providing content for users. Search engines will understand that and rank the page appropriately. There should never be a reason to write exclusively for search engines if you are optimizing ethically.

3.) Navigation and Architecture. The search engines do a very good job of determining what pages on your site are important. This is mostly done by checking the architecture of the site and determining what pages are important by how they are linked to. For example, if page A is linked to out of the main navigation from every page on the site, it is deemed an important page. This is called “internal linking.” Each link to a page is a vote. The more votes a specific page has, the most important it is. Always make sure all your optimized pages are linked to from every other page on the site, making it easy to find your content. The search engines cannot follow certain types of links — any link in JavaScript or Flash will not be followed by the search engines. Your links should be in basic HTML. You can use CSS and JavaScript to do animation and visual design, but the links themselves should be basic HTML. Also make sure you are using XML and HTML sitemaps on the site. This makes it that much easier for search engines to find your content and index it.

There are a lot of aspects of ethical optimization, but these three initial steps should set you on the right path. An effective SEO initiative should always be based on good content and providing the best information to your users. Creating good content ensures that your users are captivated and the search engines are attentive. Everything begins to fall in line after that. Good luck on all your marketing ventures!