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When you own a website, how you are ranked against the other sites available can play a big part in determining whether or not Internet users find your site. The Internet is a vast sea of information, to make your site stand out try these valuable tips from the SEO experts:

- Use breadcrumbs. Have you ever noticed the “trail” of links at the top of some sites? They’re called breadcrumbs and they’re a useful way to help visitors and search engines navigate through the pages of a site. If you’re not already using them, it’s worth the time to get them set-up.

- Understand that there is a duplicate content filter, not a penalty. There is a lot of talk about Google’s fabled duplicate content penalty. But most SEO experts agree that if anything exists it is a filter, not a penalty. So you will not be banned if you use content that is also published on other sites, but rather your site may not show in the search engine rankings pages for the page that contains the duplicated content. To ensure that you have enough pages that the search engines view as original, make sure you publish your own content that is unique to your site.

- Find keyword phrases that are bringing in a little traffic, but for which you aren’t ranking very well. Look through your site logs and find words that you’re getting a little traffic for, but that you’re not ranked in the top 20 results for. If the keyword phrase is important enough that people will look past the first or second page of results, then it presents a real opportunity. And if you’ve already made some progress ranking well for the term you should be able to get into the top 10 with some on-page optimization and appropriate links.

Then, place those keyword phrases at least three to four times in your content materials. This really helps in getting “search engine robots” to look up your site easily.

SEO really lives up to its name after all, with the search engines helping in driving traffic to websites. It is how you twist and turn your site’s SEO strategies that count most.

It really doesn’t matter which search engine you expect your visitors to use, because they are all tightening their grip on website spammers. Therefore, legitimate content and links are definitely the way to go. Follow the tips above to improve the way your site is ranked on all of the major search engines.