Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process used to get higher search engine results. It involves optimising a website so it is ‘search engine friendly’, which means it is easy for the search engines to crawl, and building it’s popularity, so that search engines rank it higher than competing websites.

SEO can be broken down into five steps:

Step 1 Keyword Research

The first step in search engine optimisation (SEO) for any website is keyword research.

What is your target audience going to type in to a search engine? Remember, we are not just talking about single words but two, three and four word phrases. The longer the phrase, the more specific it is and the less competitive it will be to rank for.

Ranking highly for a longer keyword phrase will result in less traffic, but is likely to lead to more conversions, so go after those long, specific search terms. Provided, of course, that they are relevant to your site!

Try the free Digital Point Solutions keyword suggestion tool: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/. This tool accesses the two main providers of search data, Wordtracker and Overture.

You need to find keywords that are not only going to send lots of traffic to your website, but also traffic that is going to convert into sales and clients, traffic relevant to what your site offers.

Step 2 Incorporating Keywords into Your Web Pages

Search engines analyse all the text on a web page, but the text in some parts of a page are more important than others, such as the titles. This is pretty obvious really since a title should neatly summarize what a page is about.

So, once you have the right keywords, they need to be added to the right places within your pages. This is ‘on-site’ or ‘on-page’ search engine optimisation.

Some of the most important parts of a page where keywords should be are:

• The title meta tag.
• The description meta tag.
• The H1 tag.
• The content on the page.
• The anchor text of internal links.
• The filenames of pages.
• The filenames of images.

Step 3 Search Engine Submission

Search engine submission used to be a very important part of SEO, but since links between websites became an important factor in the ranking of sites, and the main way search engines find new sites, submitting to search engines is not really essential.

That said, there are many more search engines, portals and directories other than the big three (Google, MS Live and Yahoo), so an automatic submission tool can be a big help. Do a search for ‘search engine submission tools’ for a selection.

You should be able to find a free tool that does the job well, don’t pay silly money for submission services – it is not worth it any more.

Step 4 Build Links

Increasing the number of links to a website is the most important part of SEO. Search engines interpret a link from another website as a ‘vote’ for a site, so the more links you can get to your website, the better.

Quality is just as important as the quantity of links. A link from a page or, even better, a whole site about the same subject as yours carries more weight.

The text of the links pointing to a site (the anchor text) is also important. If the anchor text includes your targeted keywords, the link is an even better ‘vote’ for your site.

A few of the main ways you can get links to your site are:

• Submitting your site to web directories.
• Exchanging links with other websites with similar or related content (reciprocal linking).
• Writing and submitting articles.

The best (and cheapest) way to get links to your site is to create great content that other sites will want to link to.

Step 5 Monitor Rankings and Visitors

During the process of optimising a website, it is important to check how well a site is ranking in the search engines and how many visitors it is receiving.

The easiest way to check a site’s rankings is to use an online tool or specialised SEO software to automatically check many keywords and phrases on several different search engines at the same time. It can also be useful to check your competitors rankings.

Checking once every couple of weeks should give you a good picture of how well your site is doing and show you the effects of your SEO efforts over time.

To see how many visitors have found your site and the search phrases they have used, check your website traffic statistics. This will help you see if you are targeting the right keywords.

These are the basic steps involved in optimising a site so it will rank in the search engines, but Search Engine Optimisation  is an ongoing process. You need to continue to build links to your site, add new content and monitor your own, and you competitors rankings.