Almost every SEO professional has a different opinion on how to perform effective SEO, but unless you know what the basic functions of SEO are your site may be missing important elements that could affect its overall ranking. The perfect SEO plan uses all of the visible and behind the page (HTML code) elements to build a Meta content driven map for the search engine robots to use in crawling and indexing your site. Making your site easy to crawl and understand for the search engines will be the difference between getting your site ranked well and getting ranked poorly, or in some cases not ranked at all! So what are the basic elements your site should have to ensure it is crawled and indexed? The use of DHTML or flash roll over buttons and drop down menus should be a priority on your "do not do list".

A few years ago if your site didn"t have drop down navigation menus or flashy looking roll over menu buttons then your site just wasn"t cool. Lets forget that from an SEO stand point alone that both DHTML and flash roll over buttons and drop down menus are ranking killers as most people just find them complicated to use or in some cases even confusing. Another big "do not do" are frames pages. If your site has a frames page as its home page, then you can forget about getting any top search engine placement. Besides the SEO affects, the use of frames pages cause problems with printing, bookmarks and even when emailing a link from a frames page. The best course of action for SEO and ease of use is to use "includes".

Your Meta structure should contain: title, description, keywords, and robots. Your Title tag should be no longer than 70-90 characters and be a descriptive title of what the page is about. Avoid using stop words like; "and" "the" "of" and "a".

Your Description tag should be unique for each page and be a summary of each of your page's content as it relates to your site and should be no longer than 120 characters, and should include a keyword or phrase.

Your keywords tag should reflect the content on your page with the first keyword being the main focus of the page content. Use as few keywords as possible (7-10 per page); many search engines consider the use of large amount of keywords to be spamming. Your content should make use of keywords throughout your site moderately. Create and make use of a robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is an efficient method of telling the search engine robots which pages and directories they shouldn't crawl and index.