Avoid Deceptive Practices. Avoid deceptive practices such as installing doorway or attraction pages on your server to manipulate search engine ranking. These practices can result in either a ranking demotion or permanent removal from the index.

Avoid Invisible Text. Text that is too small to be see by human visitors or too similar to the background color on the page is interpreted as an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings by displaying different content to site visitors and robots. CSS 'display' property set to 'none' can also be flagged as invisible text. You can test your web page for invisible text using the Invisible Text Test Tool.

Check Page Size and Load Time. From personal experience, we have found that other factors such as total page size, image file sizes, page load time and use of proprietary software which may not display the same in all browsers seems to have a negative impact on search engine placement. Pingdom offers a free testing tool as well as a paid service to monitor your page load time, file sizes and server uptime statistics. Their free tool can be accessed at Free Tools for Webmasters. For statistics about the health and configuration of your domain name, you can enter your domain name at Into DNS to obtain a FREE report.

Hire a Full Service Web Design Firm. Whether you want to launch a new website or redesign your existing site, we recommend selecting a full service web designer who provides design, content creation, programming and Internet marketing services bundled together. Not only is the cost much less but the end result is far more likely to be what you envisioned.

We also recommend selecting a website design firm or contractor who can track your site's performance and provide you with recommendations for improvement, modify your site's pages and code, and perform keyword research. By finding the right company to work with and ensuring that your site is optimized for search engines and visitors, your website can effectively reach your target audience and maximize your return on investment.

Paid Directory Inclusion. It maybe worthwhile to pay a modest fee to be included in some of the business directories especially if your site is new because your link will be found and indexed by search engines in just a couple of days, the link is a higher-valued, one-way link and your link will be placed at the top of the page before the free inclusion listings. Also, often times a paid listing gives the web site owner the opportunity to submit deep links to internal pages or subdirectories on their site thereby increasing the importance of these subordinate pages as well as the home page.