Search Engine Optimization: Where do I start?

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes any new website owner can make is to have their website designed and uploaded to the web and then to sit back and wait for things to happen! It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. The wisest thing you can do is to learn as much as you can about search engine optimization and then to apply everything you've learnt about it to your own site.

You'll probably be contacted by a multitude of seo companies offering to do the job for you but they are extremely expensive and at this point in time you most likely need to spend less rather than more. In fact, learning about seo can be extremely rewarding in more ways than one and if you can do the work yourself you'll constantly be able to update your pages and apply the latest changes at your own pace.

There are many excellent seo books and online seo resources and it can be well worth your while ploughing through some of them to learn as much as you can about seo.

You can also read the following articles which I've put together based on my own experience and research:

Choose your keywords and key phrases carefully

Write for your readers, not for the keywords

Embrace the title tag

Keep your content focused

Check your spellings, punctuation and grammar

Link your site's internal pages

Include a sitemap

Utilize your site footer

Use the nofollow tag

Use the target=blank tag

Use title tages and alt tags appropriately