There are certain guidelines that should be followed when carrying out SEO for any site. Getting it wrong could cost an immeasurable amount of wasted time, effort and money.

For anyone, wishing to get their site listed high in the search engine rankings, particularly commercial sites, it is imperative to follow certain guidelines from the beginning of the process. From populating the site to finally submitting to search engines etc. If it’s a brand new site, the first thing is to look at the possibility of having the major keyword incorporated into the domain name. It’s a fact that sites that do this have a clear advantage at the outset. If you do not ensure that your site is optimized correctly for the search engines at the outset you will immediately be at a disadvantage.

When writing each page, you should have the potential customer in mind and not search engines, so write what is commonly called ‘rich’ content which is relative, informs and absorbs your potential customers in wanting to spend time on the site and feeling confident that your site is an authority in the product or service you are offering. This will in fact also be beneficial when the search engine spiders visit your site. Try to ensure that no two pages are the same, avoid repeating paragraphs or you could be penalised. If you have two pages for similar but different products for instance. Write about them without referring to the other page, you will be amazed how easy it is to say the same thing in a totally different way and will result in a reward for your site not a penalty.

Naturally an essential element is the keywords or phrases which you want to be found for. Try at all costs NOT to have single words, it’s always better to have phrases of between two and four words. There are many free and subscription on-line keyword suggestion tools available, including Google AdWords Keyword suggestion tool and Wordtracker. You should test out the words you have selected to see how many other sites have the same keywords. Remember it’s easier to get a high ranking for a less popular keyword.

You have to decide whether you want to try and compete for a keyword which is very popular with sometimes millions of results where you have little chance of high ranking, or going for a less common term with a better chance of getting your keyword up the ranking. You will find that even these less popular terms have lots of monthly searches, so still great potential business and less competition. For instance, for me CD Duplication is very important but there are better options if you follow the logic earlier, I could use CD replication services UK or CD DVD replication and duplication which also both give reasonable returns.

Try to get the keywords you have chosen into the corresponding pages in a natural way, don’t ‘stuff’ keywords into the page, this will be termed keyword spam and your site could be penalised accordingly. Make sure you have your main keyword at the beginning and the end of the page with it mentioned several other time throughout the text, making sure it ‘reads’ naturally. If you are using images, take advantage of the alternative text. Your keywords should be highlighted in the text to show the spiders that they are your keywords.

Your browser title for the page should not be more than eighty characters, try and get it down to seventy or it could be reduced by the search engine and not make sense. The browser title is what will appear on the search engines, so not only do you want it to include your main keywords, it should look sensible. The potential customer is searching for a product and/or service so avoid the temptation of putting your company name here unless you have been able to incorporate your main keyword into the URL. After all, your domain name will appear at the bottom of the search result anyway so why waste the opportunity to put another keyword in the title.

The SEO Description should be similar to the first paragraph of the page and be a sensible statement about your company’s products and services including keywords. Make use of the anchor text within the pages of the website. Ensure you link keywords internally by referring to them on other pages but in an informed and interesting way.

One you have got to the stage where you believe your site is ready and where you think you can start submitting to Search Engines, Directories etc, pause for one moment and get your site analysed using either free trial packages or buying the full version of one of the following software packages like Web CEO, SEO Powersuite or IBP. These tolls are of immense value and will help you conclude and perfect the SEO of your site.

Once everything is in place, you can then start to make your submissions, taking into account social networking sites, specialised forums and blogs as well as to search engines like Google and Yahoo and the dmoz open directory. Pay per click should be part of any campaign but again it has to be controlled through budgets. Start writing articles and press releases to inform people of your existence, new products, and new staff, anything that you can write about authoritatively. Finally and perhaps the most importantly you must work diligently to add and continually obtain quality backlinks.

Finally, you must never stop improving and adding quality to your site in order to keep ahead, new content is essential and you should never believe you’ve finished. SEO is for life!

This is the first of a series of articles I will be writing on this subject which I hope will take some of the mystery out of this subject and belief that only the ‘experts’ can achieve the desired results. The people with the most interest in making a business successful are the owners of the business. So why pay out thousands of pounds to other people who cannot in all honesty guarantee success. I was at this stage last May when my company launched its new website and we put our trust in the company that prepared the site. Unfortunately, none of our keywords were achieving decent ranking so I decide to start the SEO process. The first thing I found was that the company we had employed to create our site had detrimentally ‘fixed’ it so that it would never be optimized. Now it is, because I learned from my experiences what needed to be done and have put the parameters into place. Our page rank has already gone from 4 to 6 but there is much to do, and now at least I know exactly what I need to do to continue the progress. Our main keywords are also moving in the right direction with several now on the first page of Google.