Step by step SEO: Chapter 4

You are about to discover your real issue... you have insufficient or weak content. It takes a lot of words to convince a search engine that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites use images to relay their message to humans, but are now discovering that search engines are blind and do not see images. Or the site content comes from a data base and the data base has
little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites but
this makes all of their content someone else's, and they either get no
credit for it or are penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the
design and content on your web site may very well need to be restructured
and expanded. [If this is not you, buy yourself a drink -- you have earned
it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimized graphics and do it right, minimize
the use of flash, avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except
where really needed, make JavaScript and css files external to the source
code, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first, and by all means
keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt SEO projects.

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right,
you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all
engines will ignore them and maybe not forever.

You can never go wrong by using meta tags, and only hurt yourself if you
don't use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have keywords (and
certainly sufficient content containing them) throughout your body section.

We recommend that you have at least 400 words of clean sentence-structure
grammatically correct content on every page. You must also have your
keywords appear as the the most common (without excess) phrases on your
pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever
your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel
of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link pages together using the keywords of the landing
page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must... use text
links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are
related. If the topics are not related, then use image links so the search
engines do not see the text and get confused.

And never, ever create doorway pages, or information pages, or hallway
pages, or whatever they are called today. Spam by any other name is still
spam. If you cannot make the real page into a subject matter expert, then
hire someone that can. But do not try to make a pig fly!