Few Site Optimization Secrets that would grow your site's presence in search engines

As a site optimization professional, quite often I am frustrated with the tricks that some site optimization professionals play on unsuspecting webmasters. Quite often, a client is kept in dark about the role that an optimization expert would play about the site and whether in hurry to prove himself in double quick time, would he employ some shady methods to prove himself that would end up webmaster paying a heavy price later on in terms of search engines shunning his site as no good. I would also like to advise potential clients that getting higher ranking for a small / medium time webmaster is a long process that may take few months and in a hurry to gain high traffic they should not commit themselves to any offer that looks too good to be true, unless the SEO is willing to share what exactly are his plans to do about your site. Of course, most SEO wont share their secrets.
I would like to share some very powerful tips with you that would help you optimize your site better and would give you a bit of idea about how it would help search engines index your site faster.

Search Engines hate duplicate Content
Duplicate content does not necessarily mean having similar content on some other web page, but also means as much having same content on multiple pages of your site or having several urls of the same web page. Of course, some times, this may happen unintentionally where a separate session id is created for the same page, as for example sites using shopping cart.
In case of duplicate content, search engine would index only one page and in case, too many duplicate pages of your site are found, it would award lower rankings to your site and in extreme cases, may drop the site from indexing altogether. While only one page is indexed by search engine, you would have no choice of deciding which page is to be indexed and in the process some useful pages may be left out, resulting in lower traffic. In case you are monetizing your site through adsense or other such ad revenue sharing program, such program too may ban you.
The presence or detection of duplicate pages on your site can affect your page rank too.
Each site indexed by Google is awarded a page rank; which ranges from 0 to 10. Page rank is Google’s measure of importance of the page. Since Google accounts for the largest share of search engine based traffic, no webmaster can afford to ignore it, even though it is matter of great speculation whether this page rank does help in getting ranking higher than a site with lower page rank in search results. Of course when you search for a term, you would find many sites with lower page rank ranking higher than sites with higher page rank. Any ways, no webmaster seems prepared to miss it. Any incoming link from a high PR rated site, passes on some page rank to your site too and hence more the incoming links and higher the page rank for your site too.
Since in case of duplicate pages, only one page would be indexed and each such page has equal number of incoming links, only the indexed pages would contribute to overall page rank of your site, thus losing some vital PR in the process.
I can see many advertisements on the web that offer translation packages; so that the content you display is not taken as duplicate. Most of the times such packages change some characters as “e” to “é” or just paraphrase the content. I would very strongly suggest not to use any such techniques.
Do try to include keywords in URLs. Besides helping you get good rankings in the search engine results, it also helps visitors make up his mind on which result to click. Besides, URLs are also used by search engines as one of the ways to determine the subject matter of a web site. while choosing domain name, instead of choosing a long name, in case you can not find a shorter one, choose a name where two components of it are separated by “-“. This will help search engine to separate two names and understand site classification better.
Search Engines wont like to have a query string in URL.
This happens mostly when the site has pages retrieved from database and some characters are attached to the end of url. Normally query string starts with question mark and uses an ampersand to separate values. Such query urls are not indexed by every search engines and those search engines that index, don’t give high rankings. A query string makes a URL longer so when search engines index the page, the keyword rich domain name and filename lose significance to the other characters added on by the query string. Again, a query string indicates that the page is created dynamically which means that page doesn't actually exist until someone visits the page with a web browser. Most search engines don’t consider dynamic pages as important as static pages in the site. one way to avoid query string in url is to use session variables, which are invisible in the urls. You can use rewrite tool as well.
I feel doing above is going to help you establish good presence in search engine results.