If you want to improve your website visibility, having a well optimized website is crucial. It is also very important to have a general understanding of how the search engines rank web pages. Over the past few years, Google has enforced numerous guidelines to combat against black hat techniques and duplicate content on the web.

At the beginning of the internet age, many website owners were posting duplicate content and keyword stuffing text like there was no tomorrow. They assumed these tactics would automatically boost their ranking – they were sadly mistaken.

Finally, Google has realized there are website owners who take pride in providing high-quality content. Websites with original content are rewarded with higher rankings and low quality content gets buried within the search engine.

The days of posting countless pages of poor quality content just to get a few clicks is over. Websites that fail to follow the guidelines will not only receive low rankings, they could get banned from the search results for good. If you want to avoid getting penalized by the search engines, SEO in Houston, TX will help bring your website up to standard.

Here are four great tips recommended by Google to increase web traffic and rankings:

• Once you have chosen the best content management system, avoid duplicate content, especially when publishing similar content on other sites. For instance, if you post an article on your blog and you decide to post a similar article on a social networking site, avoid duplication.  If you publish the same content on multiple sites, the search engines will consider it to be copy and paste content.

• Avoid publishing blank web pages in hopes of filling it up with content in the future. What many people fail to realize is that the search engines will automatically index these pages. This will not help your ranking at all. If you decide to create blank pages (or placeholder pages), use the ‘no index' meta tag so it doesn't get indexed.

• If your website contains content that's very similar, Google suggests combining the pages into a single page. You can also expand each page with original content.

• Avoid posting your copyright text at the bottom of every page. Google suggests site owners use a short tagline that links to a web page with further information. This will help reduce duplicate web content.

If keeping up-to-date on Google's latest content rules seems complicated, web design in Houston, TX will assist you. For instance, web design companies like Skygate Media http://www.skygatemedia.com offers a host of high end web design services that will help make your website more search engine friendly.

Lastly, following Google's guidelines will not only prevent your rankings from dropping, it will help you attract more quality traffic.