The team at MarketingExperiments has been doing a hell of a great job since quite some time now, and the results keep improving. MarketingExperiments is a small research agency who specializes in carrying out in-depth research that is relevant to those who need to market or promote their brand, institution, product or service online. As they say it in their own words, they are "an online laboratory with a simple (but not easy) five-word mission statement: To discover what really works." And yes, I can testify that at MarketingExperiments they do test every conceivable marketing method on the Internet while sharing many of the results for free. The Marketing Experiments Journal is a great, free newsletter that I would heartily recommend to anyone involved marketing communications. In the last issue which arrived in my inbox last night there was (among a ton of other very useful materials) a great list of 20 recommended changes that, according to MarketingExperiments' own research, have been proven to be the most important ones affecting your visibility and exposure within the major search engines. I have extracted from their original list the six-seven most important actions I suggest you take and I have added a few more of my own. Here is my top ten list of suggested improvements to increase your search engine visibility:

1. Choose the right keywords to name your content pages and use those keywords-keyphrases consistently in the Page Title and H1 tag of each page.

2. Be proactive in using your critical keywords/keyphrases when linking your site from other sites. This means making it easy for anyone to link to you by using as the actual words linking back to your site the set of keywords that best matches your focus area.

3. Put special emphasis on the top of your pages, because search engine spiders will do the same.

4. Write great, keyword-rich and impactful titles. The most important keywords should always be near the beginning of the title.

5. Give your pages very relevant names, humanly readable names and use, when possible, the same approach for your own domain.

6. If you can, use a weblog or a personal content management system to publish your fresh content.

7. Submit your site to DMOZ.org and as many specialty directories as you can find.

8. Publish great stuff, unique research articles, breaking news before everyone else, rich and passionate essays and you will be linked to.

9. Publish/syndicate news on your home page. Either post original short news items, or aggregate/syndicate best news from other relevant sources. This guarantees you that your home page is updated multiple times a day and that search engines like Google will come back to crawl your content ans site much more frequently.

10. Research and analyze your marketplace. You can learn tons from the others and you can more easily avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Go and find out more about what research shows to be working when optimizing your web site for the major search engines. Recommended.