Being a savvy search engine optimization (SEO) consumer is very important because there are many optimization practices that may result in your campaign's success or failure. Understanding some basics of SEO will help you choose the right SEO firm as well as make sure that you get the best possible results. There are many dos and don'ts for SEO and understanding them will allow you to use the time allocated with your SEO firm more efficiently.

Dos -- Make sure to include the following on your website:

- Description tag: The description tag in the meta tags is very important because it is not only a great way to include your keywords for search engines but it is also what people see on the search engine results pages. Having a proper description will convert more searchers into visitors because they will know a lot about your website from quickly glancing at the search results.

- Title tag: The title of your web pages is very important; search engines put a lot of weight on the title tag because it shows your website's relevance. Make sure to include your keywords in the title tag.

- URL keywords: Having keywords in your URL is very easy to do and will most likely help your on-page optimization. Make sure to name your files using the appropriate keywords. For example, a weight-loss-related website might be trying to optimize for “weight loss ebooks”; their ebooks page could be called weight-loss-ebooks.html.

- Fresh Content: Having lots of content on your website that is updated frequently is advised because search engines love content. Writing articles and providing them as content on your website is easy to do and will definitely help your rankings.

- Inbound links and outbound links: This is one of the most important parts of search engine optimization campaign. Having quality inbound links (website linking to you) is very important. Getting a small amount of very relevant websites to link back to you is far more important that getting thousands of irrelevant and low quality links. Keeping an eye on your outbound links (websites you link to) is also very important. You shouldn't link to websites that are using “black hat” seo techniques – read the don'ts for more details. Keep up with your link exchanges (only a small amount of websites you truly like) and always make sure that they link back.

Don'ts -- Make sure that the following is not used on your website:

- Major keywords in images: Search engines don't read text in images and if your main keywords are in images you're not fully optimizing your website for best results. Always ask your web developer or SEO firm to include your main keywords as text.

- Excessive Java and Flash: Although it's important for your website to look good, you can look crisp and professional without the use of flash or java script. Search engines don't read java script at all, and although they read flash it is read as a block of text without the power to emphasize keywords with the use of bolding, h1 tags etc.

- Long dynamic links: If your website is made with PHP - for example a shopping cart - you are very likely to have long dynamic links that search engines have trouble reading. It's very important to ask your web developer to create static links to replace the dynamic ones. For example a dynamic link might look like this: http://websitename.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=13 A static URL to replace that could be: http://websitename.com/category name/ product name.html

As you can see the static URL is not only shorter and therefore easier for search engines to read, it can also be a way to have your keywords in the URL.

- Hidden text: A big problem that will most likely get your website banned from Google is hidden text. Make sure that your text colour is not the same as the background colour. Hidden text used to be used to include excessive keywords on webpages without visitors being able to see them. Be absolutely sure that your website has no hidden text; if it does, don't panic, just remove it and Google will un-ban your website.

- Website structure with deep link trees: It is very important for your website to have the right linking structure. Having a wide or flat linking structure is best because all your webpages link to each other. This is a great SEO practice, because all of your webpages will redistribute their good page ranks to each other, and also provide search engine spiders with a fast way of getting to all of your webpages. Making sure that all of your pages link to each other is very important.

There are obviously many other dos and don'ts that you should be aware of; this article only lists a few that savvy SEO consumers should know about.