You don't have to be a computer genius to achieve higher search engine rankings for your website. Effective search engine optimization can be done by anyone who has the time and determination. There exists a horde of information, suggestions, ideas, methods and techniques about successfully optimizing your website for search engines. SEO companies do not use any 'special' tactics that we don't already know or that we can't easily research on the internet.

Safe SEO techniques:

• Content: Add valuable and relevant content to your site. The more content the better. Keep your paragraphs brief and to the point.

• Continuously update your website: Add new information and new pages to your site. Create a section on your home page containing up-to-date news items relevant to your business (ex.: "logo design" at www.logobee.com).

• Link popularity: Participate in link exchanges that are relevant to your business or that compliment your business. The more inbound links, the more important your website is perceived to be by search engine spiders. Progressively build your links. Do not add 500 links to your site at one time.

• Site maps: Include a site map on your site. Site maps can help your visitors easily surf your site.

• Meta tags and Alt tags: Meta tags contain information about the website, placed in the HTML header of a web page that is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags relevant to search engines are title, keyword and description tags. Title tags are the most important tags because they contain the information that a viewer sees concerning your website on a search engine results page. Choose a title that clearly represents your business. Make sure that your all your tags contain relevant keywords. Alt tags describe the graphical elements in a web page.

• Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3….) are tags used to represent headers and important titles. Use H1 tags for the most important headers, H2 for the next, etc. As well, use bold, italics, underlines and different font sizes. Spiders and bots give a higher value to sites that contain a variety of text and font sizes.

• Keep it simple: Make your site simple and user friendly. Make your site easy to surf, eye-catching, informative and interesting. Keep in mind that surfers have a short attention span.

• Stay away from large images and Flash images. Spiders have a preference for html text sites.

Keyword density: Keywords should exist in your title tag, headline tag, description tag and throughout the content of your home page as well as other internal pages. Be careful not to over do it though. • Informative and authoritative: Include authoritative articles pertaining to the topic of your business, such as FAQs, tips, how-to's, etc.

• Participate in SEO and webmaster forums to keep up to date on SEO techniques and search engine criteria revisions. Read websites and articles on various SEO suggestions.

• For other safe optimization techniques see Google's guidelines for webmasters

SEO companies are seemingly everywhere and will attempt to lure you in and convince you that they, and they alone can help you attain top position results in search engines. While you consider whether to go with an SEO company or not, you may want to do some research on the SEO industry. You can find some helpful information at www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html.

Instead of spending big bucks on achieving big results, take initiative and do it yourself. Don't spend endless hours worrying about search engine results and crawling spiders. While keeping in mind basic SEO techniques, customize your web site for your human users and not for spiders and bots.