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The possible SEO options are endless. Don't be a fool doing things without good reason.

SEO - the art of being googled by the most relevant googlers, bingos, and yahoos.

The world of SEO is often clouded with arguments of what the best practice is for various technical tactics.  It is made more confusing by arguments of what constitutes white-hat (good) and black-hat (evil) tactics. In this post I will not get into complex or controversial SEO. There are a million things you can do for SEO, many that YOU shouldn’t attempt and many that NOBODY should attempt.  I’m going to skip all that and give you the most basic and long-lasting SEO tactics that exist.  These are the tactics you will want to use as a foundation for all your SEO efforts, whether you decide to soldier on into more advanced SEO, or find a trustworthy SEO company worth outsourcing to.

1. Unique & Useful Content
   Every webpage has information on it. To have a page win in search engines, it must first win in content.  The information you provide should be useful, organized, unique, and entertaining (at least give it a goofy picture).
2. Internal Linking Structure
   The desired content should be easy to get to from anywhere on a site.  This means your linking structure should be tight, always link to other related content that a user may be interested in.  (Ex: Basic components of an SEO’d blog post)  You should also have an internal search function.  If you don’t have the means of developing a search algorithm in house, you can use Google Custom Search.
3. Sitemaps
   Every site needs a sitemap.  Actually that’s not true.  Every site needs 2 sitemaps.  An XML site map for search engines so they can index your site, and an html sitemap that can help both users and search engines navigate your site. A good free sitemap generator is available at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. Enter your site’s url and download the xml file and ftp it up to your site.  If you have a google webmaster account you can submit your new sitemap.PetroPages real-life experience:  When we submitted our first free sitemap, it helped google to index 18,000 new pages.Note: At PetroPages we have a large site with 80,000 pages.  If you have a large site and the free sitemap generator worked you may want to pay the $20-30 to generate a sitemap that can handle an unlimited number of pages.
4. Nice Clean URLs
   The sooner you do this the better. The theme for all the major networking sites (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.) is vanity URLs.  People choose the URL for their personal or company profile.  So why does Facebook want me to have the option of having the webaddress facebook.com/adrianisawesome?  The reason is Facebook, myspace, linkedin, all want to come up on search-engines for searches on people and brands.  If you search “petropages” on google, right after our main page, our blog, one of our clients main page, and an aboutus wiki, you’ll see PetroPages’ Twitter page, then Facebook page, and then LinkedIn page. Results #6, #7 and #8.Take a lesson from these giants of the web and whenever you make a page, give the page the actual keyword you want to come up under.
   Also: keep it as simple as possible. No numbers. No parameters. No ugly www.sitethatwontcomeup.com/jk9t9/5rhujs/huh/?col=5#panel63 URLS.

Hope this gives you some direction on where to start your common sense SEO efforts.  You can check back for more uncommon sense SEO tips in the future.