Search engine optimisation is crucial if you want people to find your website on a search engine. The difficulty lies in the complex algorithms Google and Yahoo apply to their ranking systems.

Fortunately, making your site visible during searches doesn't have to be complicated and shouldn't cost you the earth.

There are things you can do yourself to improve your search listing and page rank and they're not overly difficult to do.

Let's look at some search engine optimisation best practice techniques you can apply to your own site today.

• Quality Content

When search engines consider which site might be the most relevant option for any given search, they consider the content available on that site. If your site has good quality content based on the keywords your visitors are searching for, then chances are your site will be listed highly in the search results.

Quality content should be longer than 400 words and contain your keywords in correct proportion to the information being given. You need to be careful about your keyword density - too much and the search engines may think you're keyword spamming but too little and you risk your keywords not being picked up at all.

If you're not certain about creating quality content for your site on your own, you can always hire a professional SEO content writer at very little cost.

• Crawler Friendly Code

Many webmasters use the convenient 'WYSIWYG' web-page creation programs for speed and easy use. The problem with many of these is they can create convoluted HTML code that some search engine crawlers find difficult to read. Where possible, keep your code uncluttered and clean.

Also, javascript drop-down menus and cgi-forms might make your site more functional, but many crawlers simply can't read the code. Because you want the search engines to index your internal pages as well as your home page, the crawlers need to be able to find those pages. If all your navigation is in code they can't read, they simply won't find them.

Adding a HTML navigation bar at the bottom of your page or a site map (or both) will help search engine bots to find internal pages on your site more easily.

• Site Map

Following on from the previous tip, a site map also increases visibility of your internal pages to search engines and to your visitors. Your site map should link to every page on your site, making it easy for a crawler to find and crawl each page within your site easily with only 2 clicks.

Another benefit to a site map is your visitors will be able to find content within your site much more quickly too.

Google also offer a service called Google Sitemaps, which was created to ensure webmasters can get their pages cached on the search engine quickly.

Search engine optimisation is more than just worrying about your page rank - it's about making sure your site is seen not only by potential visitors and customers, but seen by the search engines too.

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Author - Julian Hall, Search Director of Pure Online Genius