Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an important part of any marketing strategy if you have a website or online business. SEO is the process of improving your site's visibility to the search engines. By figuring out what the search engines are looking for when they rank each site, you can improve your site's page ranking.

Obviously, the higher your site ranks in order of importance to relevant keywords and search phrases, the higher it will appear on the search engine results. The aim is to see your site reach the first page of search results so that you're attracting more visitors who are likely to click through to see what you offer.

Effective search engine optimisation is a subject that's highly debated. Big search engines like Google and Yahoo alter their ranking algorithms regularly. This can sometimes make it difficult to keep up with changes and requirements. Here are some basic SEO tips to help improve your page ranking:

1)  Keywords

Google's bots look in several places to determine keyword relevance. Make sure each page on your website is optimised for its own unique keywords or key-phrases.

Include your keyword in the page title and also in the URL if you can. Check your meta tags (the HTML coding in the   portion) and be sure your keywords are included in both the keyword tag and the description tag.

2)  Incoming Links

There is a right way and a wrong way to build incoming links to your website. Google considers the quality of the link pointing to your site by determining if that external site has similar keywords or topics to yours. If you've just blasted your link out to anyone everywhere, this could be considered 'link farming' and you could end up reducing your page rank if you're not careful.

3)  Quality Content

If your site is nothing more than a collection of links and a crazy jumble of banners, you'll be penalised in the search results. Google's page ranking algorithm considers quality content based around relevant keywords. Be sure you have quality informational content to offer your visitors. Not only will search engines rank more highly, your visitors will return to read more.

4)  Back Links

Slightly different to incoming links, back-links are created when you post a comment on a forum and leave your site's URL in the signature, or when you submit an article to an article directory and leave your URL in the resource box. Back-links can help to increase your site's visibility to a search engine.

5)  Domain Names

Using a 'top level' domain (i.e. www.yoursite.com) will increase your chances of getting listed on a search engine at all, while many search engines won't list a free web-host's convoluted URL at all (i.e. www.freeserver.freesite.com/yourname/yoursite.html ).

Buying your own domain name is not expensive and is has definite SEO advantages. Hosting packages are also available at a low cost. Making sure you have a relevant domain name for your site can help site visibility and improve page ranking as well.

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Author - Julian Hall, Search Director of Pure Online Genius