A Quick Guide to effective site optimisation.

Overall design. Try to include effective search engine optimisation concepts when planning and designing your website. There are certain design issues that you need to be aware of. These include trying to avoid frames, FLASH driven sites or designs with a lack of textual content.

Create an effective title. Make sure that your title has keywords that represent your site effectively. For the most part the title should be short but always include your keyword(s).

Include important content in your pages. The actual text on your website is very important. Search engines (spiders) read this to determine rankings. Some engines will place a higher rating of importance based on where they find the text in your page. Closer to the top is usually better, but having keywords throughout your page develops a "theme" and that too is important.

Good Content should be your number one priority. Your quest for high placement must start with a good website. It is important to have a lot of text describing what you do. Use your keywords in the content, but don't repeat them over and over. Many search engines rate sites based on 'keyword density'. This is usually a formula that looks at META Keywords, words in your TITLE, words in paragraph text, words in links to other pages, and even words in the 'ALT' text on your images.

Don't include too many images. Many web pages are almost all images driven with little or no textual content. Search engines will typically only see the image name, for example 'yourimage.jpg', and 'yourimage.jpg' doesn't go far in terms of content and relevancy.

Add Links to your web pages. We can't emphasis enough the importance of links, both from your page to other pages. First consider links on your pages. Make sure they relate to what you do (and keywords that are important to you). Links from others website's. Some search engines place a very heavy rating of importance on how many other sites in their index have links to your website.

Finally and very importantly, don't try to fool the search engines. This is probably the biggest trap people fall into. People will always come up with ways to try and 'fool' the search engines, which may work for a little while. Eventually though the search engines wail discover these tricks and write routines that penalize sites that use this practice. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: repeating keywords over and over; using invisible text (white text on white background); using very small text to jam the keywords in a small area.

Download this Quick Guide to search engine optimisation