As a regular author on a leading SEO specialty blog, I have the unique opportunity of corresponding with some of the greatest search engine optimization minds on the planet. Many of them provide outstanding tips. Recently I came across ten that could make or break your ranking. I’ve been given permission to share them in this article, so here we go…

Buyer Beware! Choose your web hosting company carefully. Be aware of the following:

1. Avoid free hosting, since search engines don’t like it.

2. Make sure the IP address of your future server is static, meaning that it doesn’t change over time. Some top engines don’t like changing IP’s due to numerous technical problems that often result.

3. Don’t host with companies that host banned websites, such as spammers or pornography. Search engines might penalize, or ban you for being associated with such sites.

4. If you are seriously considering getting good search engine rankings, you need to have a private static IP address.

Linker Beware! Watch for the following scams and pitfalls when reciprocal linking (a.k.a. doing a link exchange):

5. A site might link back to you, but then get rid of the link, or move it to a different part on their site, that isn’t ranked as highly.

6. A Webmaster might place a “rel=nofollow” attribute in his ling to you, which makes a spider ignore the link when crawling the page.

7. Your link might be placed on a link page that exists on the site’s server, but doesn’t have a link from

8. Some webmasters will point the link to a script on their page that will redirect to your site. Since spiders don’t read scripts, this link is useless SEO-wise.

9. When purchasing links, some sites will place the link on every page of their site. Google has recently begun ignoring such schemes.

Think Before You Link…Most current search engines analyze your inbound links before considering them. Many will give links that contain a string after "?" only a fraction of their normal importance, since these are often used in commercial affiliate linking. URLs with longer strings may even be ignored entirely.

Search engines work hard to ensure people cannot buy link popularity through offering affiliate promotions, or purchase advertising on other sites.

10. If your website is dynamic, it might make sense to create a separate page for each logical section of your site, rather than using URL string identifiers.

These tips came from some of the best SEO pros I have ever dealt with. For any of them who may be reading this I offer my sincere thanks for sharing this incredible information.

Mike Small is a former Harvard University computer specialist and regular contributing author at http://www.seopartner.com - a specialty blog offering free SEO tips and unbiased SEO software reviews to the public.

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