SEO Tips to Get Better Positions for Your Web Site

The biggest challenge every single website owner has, including me, is getting traffic to a web site. Just like anything, advertising, google ad words, article marketing it takes constant work to achieve the results you want and in this case, that would be to maintain a top search engine ranking.
You probably already know that the majority of people will not go past the first page of the search engine results and even less people will go past the top 30 results. Therefore, your challenge is getting your website listed on the first page of the search engines for the keywords relating to your site.
Black hat techniques are a sort of illegal SEO methods to earn popularity, rank, and top position in the seach engines. If you’re caught commiting these acts, the Google ‘police’ will ban you from the rankings, period.
1. Hidden Text And Links. As the term suggests keywords and keyword phrases are hidden on the page. Usually this is done by having the text the same color as the page color.
Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and other top search engines can detect hidden links and texts. If it’s found, you will get banned for misconduct. if you have to play the game, you have to play fair. Keep all texts and links visible so visitors know what they’re getting into.
2. Cloaking. This is where the content presented to the search engine spider is different to what is presented to the browser (you). By doing this a page that other wise would not be displayed is displayed.
3. Link farms consist of one page full of links irrelevant to your website. Google hates webmasters that build artificial popularity by building a page with links to high traffic sites. Make ethical exchanges; exchange links with websites relevant to your business to earn the proper respect.
If a search engine detects this, you’re going to experience a Google slap that will drop your web site below high ranks. So if you have a site about web hosting in Mexico and most of your links have nothing to do with web hosting in Mexico you will not receive a better ranking. You may not even make a page in their search results for trying to trick the system.
4. Duplicate content is a headache for search engines; it’s not beneficial to use the exact some content and expect a higher ranking. The search engines index one instance of the content then moves on without ranking other pages with your articles. It’s a big mistake, waste of money, and time for webmasters that do this.
5. Keyword Stuffing. Yes you need to have your keywords on your site and in your meta tags, but there is a delicate balance. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely youll rank for it. Just dont go crazy. I have about 25 keywords in my meta tags and all of these keywords are used in the content of my site. But they are used only when the content calls for it.
6. Duplicate sites are another eye sore in search engine results. Duplicate sites are exact copies of an original created with new domain names. If a search engine recognizes this, the other sites will get blocked from all results. It’s not worth the time, money, or effort to break the rules. Use good SEO techniques to earn your rank. Keep it nice, sweet, and to the point for the best results.

SEO Tools

FREE! Trifecta
Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain. Trifecta replaces SEOmoz's Page Strength tool.
FREE! Term Target
Helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword by analyzing a variety of factors.
Backlink Analysis Tool
Get an advanced look at the keywords websites are linking to you with.
FREE! SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar
The power of Linkscape is now available inside Firefox with the SEOmoz Toolbar.
SEOmoz Labs
SEOmoz Labs is a place where our more adventurous PRO users can check out the bleeding edge of SEOmoz technology and product design.
Rank Tracker
Check, track, and monitor your rankings at all the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
FREE! Term Extractor
The term extractor tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines.
Crawl Test
This tool helps quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website - it examines title tags, http response codes, cache dates and presence in the search engine indexes.
FREE! GeoTargeting Detection
Discover how well your website is targeted to country specific search engines.
Keyword Difficulty
Used to analyze the competitive landscape of a particular keyword, this tool issues a percentage score and provides a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at Google and Yahoo.
FREE! SEO Toolbox
A collection of FREE Tools that will give you quick answers and aid in daily SEO activities.
FREE! Popular Searches
This tool aggregates and archives popular searches from various sources.
Juicy Link Finder
The Juicy Link Finder is intended to find links that have authority - old domains with a high PageRank that rank well for the keyword you enter

Ref: http://www.seomoz.org/tools

Basic Search Engine Optimization Concepts

In order to implement SEO, a website designer will generally make sure that the site contains many SEO keywords and phrases in strategic locations throughout the website. He or she may also change the HTML to make the site more search engine friendly. These concepts are somewhat basic and have been being used since search engines first started being used in the mid 1990s.

There’s More!

Though making sure that the website has many keywords and phrases is very important, there are other secrets to Search Engine Optimization. Search engines also take into account the uniqueness of the content, the overall design, ease of use, quality of content, and the number of inbound links. There are numerous other factors as well, although not many people know them. Google uses over two hundred different factors in determining its rankings. It should be kept in mind that some things can effect a rating negatively; the search engines do not concentrate exclusively on positive factors. Experts in Search Engine Optimization know more of these factors than most people but much of their work is based on conjecture. Search engines add more factors frequently in order to prevent webmasters from promoting unhelpful sites. Fifteen years ago, filling a site with keywords would be enough to rank high on a search engine’s list. This is not the case in the present. Generally, if a website is of a very high quality, it will rank high with the search engines.

Since most people only look at the search results on the first few pages of a keyword search, it is important for websites designers to use SEO concepts Many factors are involved, not just the quantity of keywords. In general, if a site is designed intuitively and contains unique quality information, Search Engine Optimization should not be a problem. in order to move closer to the top of the list.