Steps

1. Research the keywords. Decide what search queries you want to show up for. Do some research on how many people are actually searching for your site. Many times it is best to consult a “natural search engine optimization” professional during this process. There are several tools available from Google, Overture, and third party software developers that can make the keyword research process easier.
3. Think outside of the box. Don’t just focus on your main keywords. The first thing to realize when targeting keywords is that it is not all about ranking for the most popular keyword. The most successful search engine marketing and optimization campaigns target the most relevant keywords. For example, if you are a realtor in a particular area, don’t just optimize your site for “real estate.” Optimize your site for dentist, florist, movie theaters, etc. You would be amazed how many unique visitors will come through to your site when “outside of the box” thinking occurs.
4. Focus on the end user. If you spend too much time trying to please the Search Engine Spiders, you may forget about the end user. Think about what your target market needs to accomplish their goals, and then put it on your site so that they can find it. The phrase “content is king” was born about 6 years ago, and it still holds true today. If you want to be relevant for specific keywords, than you need superior or at least highly competitive content. Write about 225-300 words of copy for each keyword and plant it on your site each day. Grow, grow, and grow. On average, one can target between 3-5 like keyword phrases per page. Make it as natural as possible and the Search Engines will reward you with a first-page ranking.
5. Make sure that all the pages of the site have custom titles and descriptions. If your site is using the same tags for all the pages, you are not helping search engines figure out the subject or relevance of your individual pages. Regarding Meta Tags, there are 2 very important fields:
   • Title Tag – arguably the most important SEO tag for any website. Google supports approx. 60 characters in the title, while Yahoo allows for up to 110 characters in the title. It is important to target the most critical keywords in the Title. Every page should have a unique Title.
   • META Description Tag – also very important for every page on the site. Some engines do display the description defined, while others do not. All search engines do read the description tag, and do utilize the content found within in the ranking process. A good rule of thumb is to create descriptions that do not exceed 200-250 characters. The META keyword Tag is essentially useless in today’s SEO market, but is oftentimes good to utilize as a placeholder for the keywords targeted.
6. Keep the structure, navigation and URL structure of your site simple enough for search engines to follow. Remember that search engines cannot parse your navigation if it’s using flash or javascript. So try to stay close to standard HTML when it comes to Navigation. URLs with dynamic parameters (?, &, SIDs) usually do not perform when it comes to search engine rankings.
7. Create a site map that tells people where everything is on your site. You will get about a 1% click through rate to your site map. However, it will do wonders for those who know what site maps do, and the Search Engines will like it as well.
8. Build up your popularity. So now you have determined the right keywords on the right pages, you’ve created all of the necessary content, and you’ve optimized all of the content to the best of your capabilities. Congratulations – you’re now in the top 80th percentile (from an optimization standpoint) of the websites listed for the keywords you’re trying to target. So how do you get a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd page listing? The answer is quite simple: You have to be the most popular, too. That’s right, it’s a popularity contest. In other words, how many other websites know you (link to you), and how popular are they? This is typically referred to as link popularity, or called PageRank by Google. The more sites that link to your site the better, and the more popular the site linking to you the more value you will receive for your link popularity. The best types of “link building” are directory registration, text link advertising, and press release distribution. Try to offer valuable information or tools so that other people are motivated to link to your site. Well-linked sites (that don’t use spamming) do better in search engines.

Tips

• Search engine algorithms assess the relevance of your page to any particular keyword by the content on your pages. For instance if you are selling “widgety widgets” on your site and you do not mention “widgety widgets” on your page text, search engines have very little to work with. Also make sure that you are not spamming search engines by using the same keyword over and over.
• Although not as important as they used to be, reciprocal links do still matter with Google. Reciprocate with similar websites and include keywords near the links on your site.
• If you want to optimize well for your city, state etc., make sure to sprinkle geographic search terms throughout. Include it in text as well as set apart. Search engines do not know where you are unless you tell them.
• Bold and italics can make your keywords stand out more with the search engines.
• Interior links within your site will improve SEO; Sitemaps are a great way to generate internal links and make your website better too!
• Correct broken links, search engines do not like dead ends.
• If you have over 30 keywords that mean business to you, then you might want to hire a Professional Search Engine Copywriting firm or outsource it to freelancers.
• Anyone who can go to google and type in “keyword research” will find very many tools that mixed with common sense should suffice quite well.
• Now when digging deeper to understand the traffic patterns of certain keywords use Wordtracker’s GTrends Tool. You can get an idea on the amount of competition on Google compared to the amount of searches. Now these numbers are far from accurate, But if you can kind of step back and take a broader look at things, don’t worry so much about the numbers but compare the trends since it shows the past history. See if its steady traffic, traffic that is going extinct, or traffic just starting to peak. By using this tool, you can many times find some golden opportunities.
• It really comes down to just using common sense. Just sit down and think, “What would other people search to find this? What would I search for to find this?” Try phrases in your keyword research tool to get new ideas and find the higher trafficked most targeted phrases. DO NOT look at the numbers spat back out at you by these programs as accurate numbers, they rarely are. You can still use these tools to get ideas on new keywords, search patterns of users, and many other things, that mixed with the information of trends in that area, can really help you.

Warnings

• If you are going to use freelancers, beware of duplicate content. Always make sure to check the content that you get by searching for the content on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Never have hyperlinks like “click here”, hyperlinks should always be keywords, long hyperlinks with multiple keywords are even better.
• Don’t hide content.
• Don’t create duplicate websites.
• Remember that if you use black-hat SEO techniques, you run the risk of getting penalized by the search engines and having your web site permanently removed from their index.
• Use decent search engine sites not little ones like Ask and that!!:P

Sources and Citations

• Keyword Research 101
• Keyword Discovery
• Link Building 101 :: The Key to Successful Link Building
• SEO Software

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Improve Search Engine Ranking. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

This might sound a little “out there” but I think there is a serious misconception among the general public & small businesses.

For years people have been playing around with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors and claim that they are web designers – sorry to break it to you, but they are NOT web designers, they are novices. I can personally recall occasions where potential clients have grumbled about the amount I have quoted them. Their response is often: “But my 16 year old nephew can put together a site for a fraction of that cost – why should I pay so much to you?” Or “I have quotes from other companies that are charging half of what you are – if you lower your quote we’ll give you the business.” In the beginning I found comments like these rather intimidating and I would try and accommodate these new clients even if it meant slashing my prices beyond it being worth my while. Mistakes I will not readily make again.

What I discovered is that clients that are not willing to pay you adequately for your services are usually the ones that will have the least amount of respect for you as well. These clients will probably expect you to leap through hoops of fire and give you completely unreasonable deadlines. They don’t respect your time and will most times make you change things over and over again.

The professional web design process is a lot more involved than most people realize. Again I say PROFESSIONAL web design process. The steps to designing a website that works great, looks great and attracts a great amount of traffic is both time consuming and skill intensive. From obtaining a proper brief to conceptualizing and designing an accurate visual proof – there is just something different about the way a professional works. Obviously the result achieved when the project is completed speaks volumes in itself, but most don’t understand the processes in between.

A professional web designer has to understand the principles that make up a great website. These include: aesthetics, content, structure, usability, relevance, technology & optimization.

Aesthetics:
There is nothing worse than a website that just looks bad. A poorly designed website is off-putting and reflects negatively on the company it represents. It gives the appearance that the company is unprofessional and the content contained within the site cannot be taken seriously. However a well designed website gives you the feeling that you are dealing with a professional & credible company who knows what they are talking about.

Content:
Granted having a great looking site does a lot for your business image, but if the shell is empty visitors will leave fast and probably never return. Your website content should be relevant to your industry sector and relevant to what you say you’re all about. Your content may be relevant, but id it is poorly written or has countless spelling errors, again the impression created is poor. Content should be well written, aimed at web users who are not interested in long winded stories, but who are looking for headlines and condensed paragraphs. Users want to find relevant information quickly and easily – the more you make them work to find information, the faster you will lose them.

Structure:
A website with no structure just seems to fall apart at the seams! A good structure affects your appearance, navigation, sitemap, and usability. Professional web designers don’t rely on WYSIWYG editors to put a website together, but rather have the ability to hand code every element involved in building a great site. Having complete control over the code helps one to ensure that the structure of the backend code stays intact and that it is clean. A good structure will ensure that there is a certain uniformity in the way a website looks & works.

Usability:
A sure way to lose visitors quickly is to have a site that is not user-friendly. If your navigation is hidden or so unconventional that users are unable to get to pages easily, they will leave and not return. Naming of your pages and titles of your links should also be as common as possible. It does feel good to get creative and break the mould sometimes, but people feel comfortable with what they know – they have a certain sense of security in knowing what to expect. For example: A much wider audience will respond to a button called “About Us” than would respond to “Get the low down.” The latter may seem more creative or informal, but will prove to be a lot less effective. Another important aspect to ensure is that your website works across browser platforms – a professional web designer always has this in the back of their mind, amateurs probably don’t even understand what this means.

Relevance:
Why has a visitor come to your site? How have they found you? Most would have come via a search engine after looking for something specific. If your website content is not relevant to what the user searched for, they will simply get irritated and leave your site immediately. There are a lot of tricksters on the internet and experienced users have become wise to their ploys. One of these being attracting visitors under false pretense or directing users to their website using keywords not relevant to their site’s content. If you have quality content that is relevant and well structured, you are almost guaranteed to keep visitors on your website longer and have a greater chance of them bookmarking your site for future reference. They may even be inclined to share your site with their friends.

Technology:
Today the web is alive with technology! It is a nice touch to harness some of this and incorporate it into your website. Professional web designers should have their fingers on the pulse and have a good understanding of all of the latest technology offerings. If there is a better way to do something, it should be done. Especially if it assists in aiding usability and simplicity. Amateurs will most likely be ignorant to new technologies and if they have some form of understanding, will most likely not be able to implement it correctly.

Optimization:
This is the last point, but is one of the most important. Optimization is a key factor in your website getting found by search engines, which in turn drives free traffic to your site on a daily basis. I have dealt with companies that have spent vast amounts of money promoting their website, but have missed huge quantities of free traffic simply because their website was poorly optimized. A professional designer will always develop a site that is optimized for search engines. They will understand what is needed by large search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN, but also what is needed by the lesser search meta search engines. I can use our own website as an example of this: http://www.freedomstudios.co.za relies completely on web traffic to generate new business. Freedom Studios spends absolutely no money on conventional advertising and constantly attracts quality clients who find us via search engines or directories.
Some of our clients also enjoy top rankings in Google simply because their sites are correctly optimized, relevant and have a lot of quality content.

An amateur may charge you a lot less to create a website, but the potential loss for your business is unimaginable. While hiring a professional web designer may be a slightly higher initial investment, your returns will most likely be worth a whole lot more.