I am building a new website targetting all the search engines

tips for best optimization

[Imaster]

During the recent times, lot has changed and perhaps it requires some different optimization techniques to get your site indexed very fast and with good PR, keyword density, good link text, etc.

I have read Brett's guide to a successful website and other posts like that. I haven't read all such important and useful posts as I have been active just a month back. So providing me with links to really great posts here would also help.

And I would like you guys to share tips that you would use if you would have created a new site, mainly targetting google, but not missing out on inktomi and alltheweb as well.

Please provide as much information and suggestion possible.

[Mohamed_E]

> And I would like you guys to share tips ...

<Grumble>SEO is NOT about neat tips, it is about understanding a set of principles (Brett's post is as good a source as any), planning on the basis of those principles, and doing the hard work needed to implement the plan.</Grumble>

OK, now that I have gotten this off my chest, a couple of suggestions of things to do, and a couple of things not to do.

Two things to do:

1. An excellent way of finding sites that are willing to exchange links is searching for your keywords add url. For a long discussion of variations on that theme see [webmasterworld.com...]

2. Another way of getting ideas about possible sources of links is to look at your competition's backlinks. There will, of course, be tons of internal links. One way of minimizing their inconvenience is to use Google advanced search, setting it to display 100 results. Links from the same site are grouped together, so it will be easier to find the external links.
   

Two things not to do:

1. Do not send out hundreds of indiscriminate link requests. You may be reported for email spam, see [webmasterworld.com...]

2. Do not waste a lot of time looking at the details of your cometitors' sites to get novel ideas. We get an incredible number of posts asking "I saw this unusual META tag on the page of a competitor who is ahead of me in the SERPS, what does it do?". It does nothing, your competitor is ahead of you for some much more prosaic reason.