Just the basics

Optimizing a site for search engines can really help to spread awareness of your business or bring in sales or enquiries. Depending on the competition for certain search terms you will need to tick every optimization box or just some of them. If there is a search term with no competition whatsoever then a keyword rich title tag should do it. As you progress to more competitive terms you will need to meet more of the search engines criteria for top ranking sites. If you are going up against a major online retailer with a few thousand links you will need to have all of your on page optimization up to speed as well as a large amount of decent links.

Here are some of the most important aspects to address. Make sure search engines can access your content. Web designers put all sorts of blocks in search engine crawlers paths by doing things like using images for navigation, using flash for entire sites and generally making them jump through hoops. Create your content so that it can be accessed quickly and simply. Inform search engines when you have new content by submitting sitemaps and monitor your pages so you know how many pages you have indexed by the engines.

Once your content is indexed don't be tight with it, be generous. Give the search engine spiders as much content as possible to go through. By creating quality regular content on a regular basis you will be convincing the search engines that your site is worthy of referring to when somebody searches for a subject that you have content about.

Now you've got your content on your site you want to make it look popular to the engines. You do this by creating links to it. How you create links is up to you but some good tried and tested ways are to submit your site to quality directories, offer to write guest blogs and engage in social media channels. These are the same methods that a company providing seo on your behalf will be using.