A profession that is becoming more and more popular is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Consulting, and one of the most commonly asked about topics is duplicate content and how to avoid the duplicate content penalty.

A year or two back, nefarious webmasters discovered that by creating a different website that linked to their main website, and then by placing this HTML code in hundreds of different places, they could generate a large number of incoming links in a short period of time and artificially boost their search engine rankings. This, however, was considered to be a manipulation of the search engine algorithms, and so after much brainstorming and improvement Google and other big search engines introduced the “duplicate content penalty” which punished the ranking of pages that appear in many different places, along with any pages that they link to.

Although the concept of search engine optimization can be somewhat complex, there are a number of basic search engine optimization techniques you can use to improve your organic search results. Keep the following in mind when trying to achieve top rankings for your website.

1. Meta Tags.
Meta tags are simple lines of code at the top of your web page programming that tell search engines about your page. Include the title tag, keyword stag, description tag, and robots tag on each page.

2. Create and update your sitemap.
Developing a site map is a simple way of giving search engines the information they need to crawl your entire website.