There are Golden Rules that can help quite a bit in dealing with the problems associated with search engine optimisation. Remember to use them when optimising your website and the challenges are likely to be much smaller.

These Golden Rules exist to guide you. It makes little difference what your goal is or what challenges you face, just choose the applicable Golden Rule and use it to improve your website.

Here are 5 of my best Golden Rules for search engine optimisation.

Golden Rule No. 1

Keep the content of your website fresh and up to date. The reason for doing this is that you want search engines to come very regularly and 'spider' all of your new information. Remember, the fresher the content, the better your website's page ranking, the more people find your site, the more sales you get as a result.

Golden Rule No. 2

Make sure that the text on your website has the correct keywords and that they relate as closely as possible to what you are trying to sell or the point you are trying to make. Do this carefully because if you stray too far from the actual purpose of your site, you may lose page ranking and consequently, page views. Keep in mind that Google and the other search engines want to find content and keywords that relate to individual pages as well as the whole website.

Golden Rule No. 3

Make sure your meta titles uses around 65 characters and don't use any word more than twice. Also, use your main keywords in the meta titles as well.

Golden Rule No. 4

Your meta descriptions should be no longer than 200 characters, including spaces. They should use as many relevant keywords or long tail keywords as possible.

Long tail keywords can drive significant traffic to your website even though they are often used in fewer searches, they are less competitive and often have a higher conversion rate because people who use these long tail keywords are more specific in their searches and have already made the decision to buy.

To help with your page ranking and to find free programs on the Internet that will help identify relevant long tail keywords, type "free keyword searches" into Google or other search engines.

Golden Rule No. 5

Don't overdo the keywords. While you may be trying to impress search engines with all your wonderful keywords, keep in mind that your text has to be readable for the human visitors coming to your web pages, too many keywords and it soon becomes unreadable.

Keyword density should be around 5% for any keyword on a given page. Too many keywords can get your website penalised for spamming. Staying under five percent is really important because using more than that can get you barred from the Internet altogether, and no searches means no traffic, which means no sales!