1. PAGETITLES! -- Number one is worth yelling. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and every other search engine worth a tinkers damn, the page title is the most significant factor in how your page will index in searches. Most blogging software will automatically output your pagetitles within the [title][/title] tags of your blog pages. However, if you don't title your pages with words and phrases that people are going to search for -- well, I hate to say it, but you don't deserve high rankings.
2. Mind your markup -- My first blog got all of 4 referrals from google every day. At the time, I was convinced my site was cursed. I now know that the only curse preventing google traffic was my shoddy HTML markup. If your just beginning to code HTML, avoid the lure of using [div] and [span] tags, except in special circumstances that go beyond the scope of this article. My mistake was that I had enclosed my site name, page titles, and just about everything in [div] tags, not header tags like I should have. Sure [h1],[h2],[h3] display completely differently in IE explorer and Firefox, and [divs] display the same. However, make no mistake, cutting corners, and avoiding header tags will cost you. When I finally retitled everything with header tags, my traffic from google increased a cool %1500.
Speaking of which, did you know that there is actually a difference between [strong] and [b] tags, and [em] and [i] tags? This isn't an obscure theoretical difference, such as the difference between an F# and Gb. Search engines actually read [strong] and [em] tags as "especially relevent text". To a search engine,[i] and [b] mean absolutely nothing. All they do is tell the browser to make text "bold" or "italicized"[1] Which tags will you use tomorrow?
