Search Engine Optimization

If you already have a website, and it isn't getting and visitors, heres a basic step guide to SEO and what you perhaps should be doing to get a better web presence and ranking.

Keywords.

Firstly you need to know what keywords and keyword phrases are relevant for your business/website - this is the first and most importand stage of SEO. The reason is because this is what you want to optimize your site for. You will need to do a fair amount of research into this. This will include finding all the related keyphrases, finding out how many people search for those phrases and seeing how much competition you have for those phrases, and the quality of the competition. You can then figure out which ones to target, and recreate your site to suit those keywords/phrases.

On Page Factors.

You then need to optimize your pages for those Keywords (one page per keyword/phrase) and ensure you do this in the correct way, in the correct headings, the correct density (too much you could be penalised, too little and the search engines won't know that is what your page is about) The exact measure of these is gone into in more datail in other areas of this website.

Internal Linking.

You want to make sure any pagerank you get is distributed evenly around the website - or even better biased towards your most importand pages. Get rid of those links you don't need, especially external links that will just leak your hard earned PR.

Link Management.

Now you need related quality websites to link to you. And you want to make sure that they use the correct anchor text when they do so. Don't make it all the same, but make sure they are all relevant to keywords/phrases that you are trying to rank for within the search engines. You may have to 'exchange links' to do this, in which case try to ensure the sites you link to are good quality and are not in the search engines bad books. If you can get one way links to your site, get them all, however tiny the PR of the site, they will all count, and the engines won't penalise you for links only coming IN to your site, so don't worry if some of the quality isn't so good - just don't link back!

By Following the simple steps above this will give you a basic intro into the SEO for your website before you tackle some of the advanced SEO tricks. Be warned, this can take time. Google for example often seems to 'sandbox' new sites, but stick with it and as long as your doing everthing correctly you should see results.