How healthy is your website's SEO? With the recent Google page rank update, many folks are wondering.

It pays to do your homework if you want to excel at optimization. Helpful resources abound, but a discerning approach is imperative - not all self-proclaimed "oracles" to SEO wisdom can back up their claims. Google's Webmaster Central is essential reading, and participation on forums such as High Rankings is a great way to learn from others in the search marketing community.

"Crawlability"

Check for hurdles to crawlability. Viewing your site in a text browser such as Lynx is a great way to know whether you can get to all your pages, and whether there are potential obstacles such as JavaScript, Flash or frames.

Google Site Maps

Submitting an XML site map may expedite the indexing process and enable you to glean information about possible crawl errors. Sign up for Google's Webmaster tools where you can easily submit your site map.

Google Analytics

This is a way to evaluate your user behavior, benchmark yourself against conversion goals, observe bottlenecks and identify popular search terms. Signing up for Google Analytics is free!

Style and substance

Visitors may arrive from any page, so ensure that every page is eye-catching, balanced and intuitive. Grab your visitor's interest with good call to action and easy navigation - your competition is just a "back-button" click away. Brainstorm new ideas that your audience may be interested in, especially anything that your competitors don't offer.

Everybody join in!

Let your users help you build new content. Establish yourself as an authoritative resource, or just a cool place to hang out and exchange ideas. Create a buzz - traffic and links will follow. If you're not blogging, you should be! A good blog with RSS feeds and comments will allow for greater user participation on your sites.

Trial and error

Rankings can take months to generate, so be patient. Tweaking and updating is fine, but avoid impetuous wholesale changes if your rankings dip unexpectedly. Log your changes and monitor your results. Here's another great use for the Google Webmaster tools - and be sure if you change your page URLs, you use 301 redirects from the old urls to the new ones.

Inbound Links

Quality and relevance matters over quantity. Avoid link farms and dubious link schemes. The best links are natural, warranted links from reputable sites. Submit your site to Open Source Directory , plus industry and geo-specific directories such as Directory for Real Estate .

Text links

Include a clearly visible sub navigation row of text links at the bottom of each page, especially if you have dynamic menus at the top of the page. Add a hierarchical 'sitemap.html' page, and ensure that the links in your text content include descriptive keywords as anchor text rather than just "click here for more". Text links should be placed strategically to aid readability.

Things to avoid

Getting it right is only half the battle of enhancing your optimization skills. There are also pitfalls you should avoid if you want to ensure your sites are reaping rewards ...

Be "spider" friendly

"Make sure your technologies aren't so leading-edge that engines can't keep up with them yet," says Matt Cutts. And if you use Flash, provide an HTML alternative and as much search engine friendly content as possible.

Don't mislead

Deceptive, black-hat SEO techniques and sites bearing hallmarks of spam, may render your site penalized or even blacklisted, and could cost you conversions, undoubtedly sullying your hard-earned reputation.

SEO overkill

Above all, avoid duplicate content, page cloaking and sneaky redirects, keyword stuffing, and invisible or tiny text. In other words, avoid anything that just doesn't look or sound right.

And just how well did your website do in the recent Google page rank update? Did you experience a gain or a loss? Let us know in the comments!