As the year 2009 starts, it is a perfect time to refine your webmaster skills. Here’s 50 tips to improve your experience as a webmaster, making it more profitable and easier for you.

1. Use clean, effective, design.
2. Don’t overload your site with advertisements.
3. Use a favicon and other site logos (etc) that are easy to remember.
4. Use valid code. (X)HTML is the most important for SEO, but CSS and other code should also be valid.
5. Don’t forget about a website. Even if you are done with it, and it is functioning, check back to see what people are saying.
6. Get to know your users. This will help you understand them.
7. If there is someone that comments on your blog often, join his blog and comment there.
8. Don’t spend too much time with statistics. If you continually make your site better, the statistics will grow.
9. Read, read, read. Read content similar to that on your site. Read content different from what’s on your site. Just keep reading.
10. Use the bold, italic, and underline. They will help keywords stick out to not only users, but search engine bots.
11. Spend a long time on some posts. Make them perfect, these posts are the ones that will bring in people. If you can’t spend time on all posts, make sure that all posts are at least quality content.
12. Put keywords near the front of your title tag, and the name of your site at the end.
13. Only optimize for some keywords. Pick the keywords that are relevant to your site that aren’t the most popular. If you optimize for too many keywords, you won’t get very far.
14. Proofread your posts. No one will want to read a post with lots of errors.
15. The fastest way to get a site indexed is to link to it from an already indexed site.
16. Don’t focus too much on profit. If you are doing everything right, profit will come with time.
17. Give your site time to grow. You won’t be at the top of the search engines immediately, it could take years.
18. Join communities and make friends. If you are looking to advertise your site on forums, join a forum and then post some. Help some people out. Then, make a topic on your website.
19. You want a broad range of topics for content on your site, but not too broad. It has to be the perfect balance.
20. Speed matters on the web. If you are using shared hosting, and it’s slow, consider switching to a VPS. This will help with search engine bots and impatient users.
21. Quality content should be the only content. If you have posts that aren’t worth reading, what do they add to your site?
22. Post new content at key times during the day. If most of your users are in specific timezone(s), add content when it is prime time for those timezones.
23. Get to know different social network and media sites. They will help you get your site known.
24. Let users know that you are a real person. Engage in conversation with them, and help them.
25. Don’t keep secrets. You shouldn’t have ideas that you aren’t willing to share with your user body – chances are that if you have these ideas they are good ideas, so you should share them.
26. Have unique content. If there are 100 other established sites with the same content as you, why would a user go to your site?
27. Organize content in a way that user’s are interested in. For example, user’s tend to like Top 10 lists and such.
28. Include images in your posts. This will keep users interested, and decrease your bounce rate from social media sites.
29. Set up images properly. Be sure to have captions with all of your images.
30. Put yourself in the shoes of the user. Try to understand why they would use your site, or why they wouldn’t.
31. Set goals for yourself. This will help you achieve what you want to achieve.
32. Be organized. Plan out content before you put it up, and keep thinking of ideas for new content.
33. Don’t run too many sites if you can’t keep up with adding content to them, but running a lot of sites isn’t bad.
34. Get your friends to join your sites. They are the few that have to like them. ;]
35. Get help when needed. If you can’t do something yourself, pay the money to have someone else do it. It won’t hurt you in the long run.
36. Decide on how you want a site to be before you start on it. Is it going to be a quick project or a long project? Plan accordingly.
37. Don’t aim too high. If you expect too much, you won’t achieve what you want to achieve. Instead, set smaller goals.
38. You don’t have to be at the top of the search engines to profit.
39. Give the appearance of knowing what you are talking about, even if you don’t. But don’t try to make stuff up, it won’t work.
40. Get backlinks. This will help bring traffic to your site and raise your PageRank.
41. Give backlinks. This will help show users that you are legitimate and not in it just for the profit, but you actually want to help people.
42. Add quality content as often as you can.
43. Spend extra time in the opening paragraphs of your content. This will have to catch user’s attention.
44. Don’t use AJAX where it isn’t needed, this won’t help your search engine ranking.
45. Test with every browser and configuration. Every user that visits your site and then finds that it displays wrong in their browser is a lost customer.
46. Use media affectively. It will make your site more interesting to users.
47. You can’t control your links coming in, but you can control the links on your pages. Occasionally check that the links you have added are legit and not doing anything that you wouldn’t do (ex link farming).
48. Write to earn, but also to teach. It’s great to work with keyword density on your articles, to maybe increase your SEO and profit, but you should still write to teach.
49. Listen and learn. You can always improve your game somehow, and the little improvements are the ones that add together and make the real difference.
50. Have fun! Personally, I’m happy that I’m making websites instead of having a real job. It’s something that I like to do.

Something I missed? Something you disagree with? Leave a comment.