Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must if you want your website to be found or be competitive on the internet. There are certain basic SEO guidelines, or rules, that should be completed before your site can even begin to be indexed with Google, or the other major search engines. Surprisingly a lot of websites don't even have the basic ground work laid to even begin thinking about getting search results. Luckily I have some answers for you straight from Googles mouth.

A quick word to website owners

There are tons of so called seo experts out there that will tell you they can guarantee your website a spot on the first page. Which they might be able to get your site listed on the first page. However, how long will your site stay on the top page, and more importantly how many visitors going to your website will convert into a contact, a customer or purchase a product? That is afterall why you want top search results in the first place. Well, guess what. Nobody can guarantee you any results they can only estimate. Google changes the way searches are handled sometimes on a daily basis and their secrets are heavily guarded. It's like guaranteeing a couple that they will get pregnant and have a baby boy instead of a baby girl.

Lay the ground work for SEO on your website

With any project, business, plan, campaign, website or design you have to start with the basic fundamentals. If you don't then whatever you're doing usually suffers later. As my parents always told me, "Take the time to do it right the first time instead of wasting money or time fixing it later."

Here is a brief overview of some starter SEO tips:

• Create unique and accurate page titles for each page on your website

• Write a good description meta tag that summarizes that page's content and both informs and creates intererest in a user that reads it.

• Improve the structure of your URLs

• Make youre site easy to navigate - I feel like this deserves a "duh" but there are still plenty of sites that don't have good site navigation or content structure.

• Offer quality content and sevices - Quality content is King.

• Write better anchor text for links both outgoing and internal links

• Use heading tags appropriately

• Optimize your use of images - Another one that I feel deserves a "duh" but I still see chunks of text in a jpg's that should be plain text.

• Make effective use of robots.txt files

• Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links

• Use good practices when promoting your website

• Promote both online and offline - Sometimes people forget there is a world outside the web.

• Learn about web analytics and how to use the data to make improvements to your website.

More details straight from Google themselves?

Download the "search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf" straight from Google. It goes over the points that I covered in detail and will get you on the right track, or identify what basics your missing with your current website.

If you have some specific questions then leave a comment. I will do my best to answer, or point you to the answer.