SEO means Search Engine Optimization. So an optimized page would normally have good ranking in search engines. Since I know quite a bunch about SEO, I'll make a "SEO guide".

Which search engines?
Firstly, you should know what search engines that are actually important.
Around 50-60% of all searches are made in Google. So Google is the major search engine world wide, and this is the most important engine.
Yahoo and MSN Search engines are also large, and have around 30-40% of all searches world wide. Yahoo is a bit more used than MSN.
The rest 5-10% are other search engines. So, optimizing your site for Ask Jeeves, AllTheWeb etc. would be a waste of time.

Submitting your site
If you're not already indexed, you should submit your site. There are many submissions services. This search gives you a bunch of submission services. But you should also submit the sites directly to the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) manually.

Note: A submission service submitting your site to 10,000 engines is not better than a service submitting your site to the 20 major search engines. 9,980 engines would just be small engines which would give you 0,5-1% more traffic.

Google sitemaps
The Google Sitemaps is a service by Google where you can submit an XML sitemap. This will make it easier for Google to crawl your site, thus increasing the chance for getting indexed and getting good ranking.
If you don't know any XML or need a generator, you can try this script which will crawl your site and generates a sitemap.

Incoming links
This is an important part. If you don't have any links from other sites to your site, you won't get a good rank, as the search engines will see your site as an unimportant one. Link farms are usually not a good place to advertise your site in, and many of them are actually banned from some engines.

You should also be sure to submit your site to directories such as DMOZ.

Content
Unlike what many people believe, the content is more important than the incoming links.

If the keyword is "anime" and you expect people to visit your site by using that keyword, you should not just write a lot of stuff about japanese drawings without mensioning the word "anime". The more often the word appears, the better. But remember to have real content, and not just writing "Anime is cool, Anime anime anime".

The site should also be updated pretty often. Old sites that are not updated will usually lose their good rankings.

Also, good grammar is actually important. A site with lots of grammar errors will not get good ranking.

You may also try to look at sites that are similar to the one you want to promote, and see what they have and you don't.

Coding
This is also an important part. Firstly, you should have all styles in an external CSS document. Also, the site should not have many HTML/XHTML errors. These can be found using the W3 HTML Validator. (A CSS validator may be a good idea too.) Your site should validate as XHTML 1.0 strict or HTML 4.01 strict.

All images should have descriptive alt= tags:Note that the alt tags are required for valid HTML/XHTML documents anyway.

You should NOT use images as your content, and the content should not be in flash or java. If you do this, the search engines will not see the actual content, and it won't get good ranking.

The <title> tag is also very important. If you have a site about anime, you should have the word anime in your title. But the title tag should not be too long, since each word will then be less "valuable".

The keyword and description tags should be as short as possible, but you should include a good description about your site. If you have an anime site, you should not have lots of keywords such as "computers, software, new york, google, cool, search" etc.NOTE: If you are using html, the end tag should be /> and not just >.

The header tags are also important. <h1> is the most important tag, and should be used in the headers. <h2> is less important, but still more important than normal text. Since headers often are what you want you want people to search about, you should use <h1> and <h2> tags on the headers (other <h> tags works, but the higher the number is, the less important will it be).

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Well, I'm pretty sure I forgot something, but that's all folks.

This post has been edited by Amezis: Feb 8 2006, 03:43 PM

this was really useful and thanks for providing such useful info.

By following the above methods I have raised my sites Page Rank in Google and Yahoo and a few other search engines.

Thanks. Those steps also helped me to get #1 on many keywords in MSN. However, it seems like Google has banned me, and those steps won't help you getting un-banned. There are a few things that may help to get un-banned, but none of them has worked for me, yet:

Duplicate content
If your content is copied from another site, no search engines will like you. This is a very common way to get banned.
So, if you have many domain names for your site site, you should only have 1 main site. The other domain names should be redirecting to the main domain name, or make your main page have full links (<a href="http://...">).

Hidden content
You should not attempt to hide some content with your keywords. Using the example with "Anime", you should NOT have hidden content (or unreadable text) with "Anime info", "Anime games", "Anime comics" etc. All your content must be visible. (You can of course use Javascript for expandable/collapsable areas, such as the forum index here.)

Keyword stuffing, long title tag etc
You should not have too many keywords for your site. More than 20 keywords will just be useless, and the spiders may just ignore it. Also, you should not have too many characters in your title or description tags. This, however, should not get your site banned, but will give you poor rankings.

Don't use images for content
Some sites wants to be very fancy and cool, and uses lots of images, even to display the content. Firstly, remember that search engine spiders will not be able to read the text on the image, thus not understand what the site is about. Secondly, people with slow internet will have to wait many minutes for your site to show, and many will leave because the loading time is too high. Lastly, this will lead to a massive bandwidth usage, which would be very expensive for you. As the keyword stuffing, this will not ban you, but will lead to very poor ranking, if ranked at all.

Wow Thank you guys, When I get My site up Im going to follow this info, I looks realy Helpful.

Also, I heard It is Improtant to have Key words that are Searched for alot but that other sites do not have.
===========================================================
example:
If about (Anime media)
Keywords would be : Anime Video, Anime Wallpaper, Anime Music, Anime MP3, ect.
===========================================================

P.S. Amezis your "Keyword stuffing, long title tag etc" I think is slightly wrong, please check Narutofan.com
before you flame me. View its sorce, because it is rank 1 in all Naruto Related keywords, and he Has about 70 - 80 key
words at least.

This post has been edited by Yin-Yang: Mar 2 2006, 03:02 AM

No, Amezis is right - keyword stuffing is not something that is recommended. Go to any online automatic meta tag generators and they won't let you enter that many. Penalties for keyword stuffing may not be as severe as they once were because nearly all SEs except Yahoo pay very little regard to meta tags anymore. Keeping that in mind, even if it doesn't penalise you, you're pretty much wasting your time putting all those words in due to the lack of importance attached to them.
As for why the site ranks well for say 'naruto' - it could be that there is very little competition for the keywords featured on that site.

This post has been edited by Tyssen: Mar 2 2006, 03:20 AM

True I see your point, How many Keywords do you say I should have? I am currently making A website, and I would realy like it near the top. And is it possable to beat the offical site in ranking? I do not think it is. Oh well,
Hey, will it help if you get I site that ranks High, but is compleatly a different subjet from yours.

PS Hey, I just heard That Keywords and Meta Keywords are different is this true?

and if they are, can you please tell me how to put normal keywords into my site, Thankyou.

This post has been edited by Yin-Yang: Mar 3 2006, 12:52 AM

The most important parts about SE rankings is not only the number of people linking to you but also the quality or popularity of the sites that link to you.
One link to your site from CNN will be worth more than 100 links from sites that no-one looks at.

thatw as a decnt guide to SEO. Duplicant content is soemthign to stay away from though, but as far as I know the SEs won't punish the original website they will however not include the duplicate sites published later.

Also, pay very close attention to your selected keywords or the SEO may be very hard or in vain.