Taking the necessary steps to ensure that your web site can be found by its intended target audience is an incredibly important part of the design, build and copywriting process.

Search Engine Optimisation can seem like a bit of a black art, but take care of the basics, and you can get 90% of the job done without consulting the rune stones.

Here is my top ten of essential SEO:

  1. Domains: register your domain early or use an established domain; search engines can sandbox (effectively hold back) web sites with young or recently registered domains. It also helps to use a domain which contains a few prime keywords that relate to your area of activity.
  2. Page titles: summarise the page, include three or four prime keywords which also feature in the page content. Also make page titles human-readable as you want users to see and understand the title on the search engine results page, and be interested enough to click through. Page titles are extremely important, so get them right.
  3. Keyword and phrase research: put yourself in the mind of a potential user. Think about the words and phrases they are likely to use when you want them to find your site. Use these keywords and phrases in page content and metadata…
  4. Metadata: write appropriate description and keywords tags which are tuned into the content on each page. Generic keyword and description tags are of limited value. Using relevant keywords in page URLs also makes a difference.
  5. Web standards page coding: there are many reasons why web pages should be constructed in modern standards compliant coding, not least of which is that it helps search engine visibility no end. Good coding also helps overall usability and will make pages work better on a variety of different browsers and Internet connected devices.
  6. Page content: not only should you give people a reason to visit your web site, but having good quality relevant text content is also important for search engines and PPC ads, which look for and analyse text on each landing page.
  7. Keywords and phrases in URLs: formulate URLs with relevant text containing primary keywords. Avoid lengthy URLs loaded with query string parameters and ID numbers.
  8. Sitemaps protocol: this is a file or dynamic XML feed which summarises every page on your site; search engines read and process these files to help them index your site more completely and often, more quickly, it’s like a short-cut around the search engine’s link discovery crawlers. SE sitemaps are particularly important for large web sites with a lot of content.
  9. Inbound links: the more quality, highly ranked sites which link to your site, the higher your page rank will be. Consider creating good content specifically to bait inbound links, but write for people, not for search engines. Avoid driving the site from one container page – frames and single object Flash are particularly damaging. If you prevent deep-linking, this kills your traffic generating potential. Avoid link farms and don’t rely on reciprocal linking.
  10. Analytics: don’t just look at the basic top-line figures, use your web analytics to mine deeper for information about how your site is being found, what works and what doesn’t. You can also experiment with content and design variations, track the results and continue a cycle of fine tuning to improve results over time. Creative use of analytics can also be used to examine user behaviour and test UI variations. It’s a powerful tool, use it.
  11. Don’t cheat: your site can get penalised, or blacklisted altogether, if you attempt to beat the system. Don’t use link farms, autosubmit services, text cloaking or anything like that. Google is particularly hot on this and has a webspam team dedicated to the task of weeding out the cheats. Generally speaking, honesty pays in SEO.

This only scratches the surface of what you need to do in order to achieve good natural search rankings and generate traffic for your web site. Of course, just ticking these items off the list isn’t enough – to be truly effective, the work has to be done right.

Even getting 90% of the way there with your search marketing efforts will take some experience and expertise. Breaking into that last 10% will take a considerable amount of effort, which in many cases could be hard to justify.

Get the basics right and your web site will be found. Just make sure there is something compelling and usable when people arrive. Think beyond visitor arrival.

Finally, paid search. This is an enormous revolution in advertising, just look at the rapid growth and huge revenues of Google. This is also one area where thorough setup and incremental fine-tuning is essential, particularly when there is a lot of money at stake.

If you don’t take the necessary steps to make your Web site visible, you are pretty much wasting your time creating it in the first place.