If you're serious about SEM (and who isn't), you owe it to yourself to buy and read his Search Engine Marketing Handbook.

This charming Englishman is both eloquent and articulate in describing the impact those search algorithms have on your site, business and marketing plans. He's a big picture guy who really sweats the details. If you need SEM help and can afford the best, then get to Mike and use him on a consulting basis.

In the meantime, Mike has also given us his Top Ten Tips for Search Engine Marketing. I, myself, have read through the tips below four times. Enjoy, and please pass them along with the rest of this newsletter to others you think will benefit from them.

1) Many websites suffer from low-or-no visibility with the major search engines because those sites have technical barriers. Most search engines employ outbound crawler technology. Crawlers collect text and follow links: that's it. Don't make it difficult for them to get at your content by using password protected or log-in areas. Don't have your best "keyword rich" material locked away inside a database where it's difficult for a crawler to find it. And if the use of frames isn't absolutely essential - then do without, because crawlers still have some difficulties with them.

2) No matter what you hear anywhere else, meta tags are just not "happening tags" anymore. Yes, to be on the safe side you still need them. But they'll never be as important as the king of tags: the <title> tag. Don't let your Web pages join the millions and millions of guilty no-hopers with the dreaded word "Untitled" (or even worse than that: "My home page" urgghhh!) where those lovely relevant keywords should be. It's simply the most important tag on your Web pages - so what are you waiting for? Get to your site and make sure that every page has a stunning <title> tag.

3) Link popularity (as it's popularly known) is a very important ingredient in most search engine algorithms. But the quality of your links is more important than the quantity. Be sure to get links from/to only those sites which are relevant to your subject matter and have authority themselves in the same "link neighbourhood". Avoid link farms or any schemes designed to attempt to fake your link popularity. Remember this: if you've got content worth linking to - then people will want to link to it.

4) Think like your potential customer/visitor. You may know your product and your industry inside out, but that doesn't mean your entire audience does. Just because you understand all the "in stuff" and "industry jargon" don't assume that they will. You may want to refer to your organisation as: "eco-friendly waste management and disposal consultants." But to everybody else - you're the garbage collector. Think about the keywords they'll be typing into the search box at the major engines and directories and research thoroughly.

5) I hate to be the one to break this to you... but there's no miracle software for getting a better ranking at search engines. In fact, most software designed to remotely interrogate search engine databases is very much frowned upon by the search engines because it sucks up their resources. Software and online services which suggest that they can submit your site to 40 gazillion search engines and directories usually end up providing you with nothing more than a sp*m attack (and possibly even a bad reputation with major search engines).

6) Further to tip number 5, don't obsess over what rank you have at search engines. Remember, it's possible to have a number one rank and no traffic at all (if you target a keyword/phrase which nobody is looking for). Check your logs or use live tagging to track activity and referrals to your web site. You can tell more about what's working and what's not for your business than you ever will from a ranking report. And remember, Google, for instance, only updates its general database on a monthly basis. So, checking your rank for 1000 keywords on a daily or weekly basis is pointless and will eventually have your IP address pulled if you're spotted abusing a search engine's precious bandwidth.

7) Sometimes, it's just as important to not let a search engine crawler into certain areas of your site. I'm not talking about sensitive material (which you shouldn't have on the public Web anyway). I'm talking about the possibility of alternative pages. For instance, some Web sites may be developed with different screen resolutions in mind. You might have a java-sniffer to detect which resolution your visitor's monitor is set at (i.e. 800x600) and have a divert to that part of the site. The likelihood is that this will be a mirror containing duplicate material. Duplicate pages and mirror sites, even when developed for legitimate user experience, can still be mistaken as sp*m by a search engine. So remember to use the robots exclusion protocol and add that little text file to your root directory telling the crawler where it can and cannot go.

8) Choose a good ISP with an excellent track record. If your Web host suffers from periods of downtime, then you'll certainly suffer periods like the invisible man. Search engines don't want their users clicking through to sites which don't exist or pages which are not there. Make sure you use a decent link-checker to be certain that all your pages are online and use a monitoring service to make sure you have at least 99.9% uptime from your service provider.

9) The very, very important tip: if you can get your linking partners to use your keywords in the anchor text of the links on their pages, make sure they do. The more on-topic and relevant to the content of your pages the link anchor text is, the better! So, remember this convention when seeking linking partners:

Link with little power:
For more details on knitting patterns click here (where 'click here' is the anchor text).

Link with great power:
Click here for more details on knitting patterns (where 'knitting patterns' is the anchor text).

10) Finally: don't develop a Web site for knitting patterns if you want to be an Internet millionaire :-)

These tips were provided to Web Digest for Marketers by SEM Guru, Consultant, and Author Mike Grehan. I thank him for succinct knowledge transfer found not only in the tips but also in the site reviews and selection of those sites that preceded these tips.

You can see Mike live at upcoming Search Engine Marketing conference with Danny Sullivan, as well as in June at the eMetrics conference in California. LC