What does everybody with top rankings know that you don't know? That's the question that drives most people in their quest for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) information.

The foundation of a top ranked site should be SEO Friendly or SEO Ready – both are terms used for making sure the foundation of your site is clean, concise and “friendly” to the search engine bots that crawl your site. Have you ever tried to build a house of cards? Your strategy as the house grew more complex was very important - but none of it mattered without a solid foundation.

To get top rankings and have long term SEO success you simply cannot ignore the foundation of your campaign. 

A solid foundation consists of the following:

• Clean code that is error free
• Java script that is in an external .js file and not on-page
• CSS in an external file and not on-page
• Easy to navigate pages that are well connected to each other
• A clearly defined topic for each page
• URLs that the engines can follow
• An XML sitemap
• A robots.txt file
• No frames
• No Flash or java script navigation
• Text that is on the actual page and not contained within Flash or an image
• (while the engines do read Flash, you shouldn’t have all of your text within
• Flash) once you are sure your foundation is in place you should spend some time checking out your competitors to see what they are doing.
• What keywords are they using?
• How is their foundation?
• What on-page optimization do they have in place?
• How many links do they have?

You don’t want to copy your competitors – but you do want to see what you are up against.

Now you are ready to move on and start dealing with your on-page and off page optimization.

What does everybody with top rankings know that you don't know? That's the question that drives most people in their quest for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) information.

The foundation of a top ranked site should be SEO Friendly or SEO Ready – both are terms used for making sure the foundation of your site is clean, concise and “friendly” to the search engine bots that crawl your site.

Have you ever tried to build a house of cards? Your strategy as the house grew more complex was very important - but none of it mattered without a solid foundation.