SEO experts are constantly telling us about the importance of good quality content and good quality back links from web sites with relevant content. They also tell us that reciprocal links and page rank are of decreasing importance. They then instruct us as to how to go about getting good links by personally contacting other web sites and proposing a reciprocal link! Confusing! As is much of the advice given to prospective site designers.

Personal experience with our own web site has shown that the following is correct and works;

· Content is the key. Lots of it, with constant up dates to it, and it should be well written and informative not just a sales pitch.

· The more pages you can create the better. Upwards of 100 pages will highlight your site as an important one. Sites with only a few pages rarely appear on the first page of search engine results.

· As the site ages its importance will increase. Those who got in early generally outperform the later sites. Google also have an ageing process for links. As these links approach six months old they become of more importance.

· Reciprocal links once gone through the ageing process are still being counted, even with Google's updated algorithm.

· Article writing and publishing will produce huge numbers of backlinks. You should be looking to produce upwards of 30 articles and aim for around 250.

· Attaching a weblog to your site which is updated daily will increase the rate at which the search engines visit your site and at the same time adds valuable content and links.

· Page Rank has still some importance in determining your position in the rankings because it is based on the links and the content of your site. However the page rank as given by the Google Toolbar is not necessarily accurate. A more accurate page rank can be gauged from using the detail supplied by the Google Sitemap statistics. Consequently generate a sitemap and submit it to Google.

The most important piece of advice is to design your site for the visitor and not the search engines. Have as much information within the content as possible and keep the graphics to a minimum.