Before we start on the basics of search engine optimisation there are a few technical issues that need to be addressed. Some are vital, others optional, all are worth thinking about.

1) If your site is built purely in Flash you need to provide a text-based alternative - this can help the visitor and also allow the search engines to index all the content of the site.
2) A site needs good text based navigation. Don't rely on javascript or Flash navigation, if neccessary create a text based site map and link to this from the home page.
3) Only have one copy of your site on the web. If you have more than one domain name, ie the .com, .co.uk and .net names, choose one and redirect the other names to the designated address. A 301 Moved Permanently is recommended for this situation. Also check whether your site can be found without the three w's ie http://example.com - if so get your webmaster to 301 those to the target url too.
4) Check your site for broken links - use Xenu, a free utility that will crawl your site and list any broken links. Xenu also creates an html site map automatically - you can copy and paste that onto a page on your site (see No2 above).

I will expand on this as and when I feel the need.

Now it's time to look at the pages - and at this point you need to see your site as a collection of individual pages, not as a single site. Let me explain - any page on a site can be an entry page, not just the home page, so it is important that you treat each page as such. There are times when you must work from the opposite viewpoint, but for now lets focus on individual pages.

First, a look behind the scenes - look at your pages in a browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer and go to the View menu at the top of the browser and go down to Source or View Source and you will see the code that creates your page. Firstly, is there a big chunk of javascript code there? Look for something like this - < script type="text/javascript and what looks to a layman as gobbledygook. If it's there, ask your developers if they can put this into an external file.

Similarly, if you look at the source and see any of these tags enclosing your words - < FONT FACE= or < FONT SIZE= or < FONT COLOR= - then you need to get these into an external .css file and off the page itself.

Finally, in the < HEAD> of your page make sure you have a document type declaration and a language declaration. More detailed information here. If this is too technical for you, speak to your web developer.

PLease note: some of the tags, etc that I have used in these articles are technically wrong, ie they have unwanted spaces in them. This is because Squidoo would not work correctly if I inserted certain tags or commands into this page - but you'll get the general idea.

Possibly the most misleading, over-hyped waste of time in current search engine optmisation is the meta tag.

These tags live in the < HEAD> of the pages, but the truth is you only NEED one meta tag - the description tag:

< META NAME="description" CONTENT="Compelling description of the page and/or call to action">

The reason you need this tag is that it often gets used as the description of a page in the search engine results pages (serps).

The other popular tag is the keywords tag:

< META name="keywords" content="keywords here" >

In the early days of search engine optimisation these meta tags were the quick and easy way to get to the top of the serps. But soon online marketers pushed this technique above and beyond all reason and the search engines eventually gave up on them and rendered them all but useless.

The only other meta tag I use is the robots tag. If I have a page that I do not wish to have indexed by the search engines I would use this:

< META NAME=robots CONTENT="noindex" >

This tells a visiting robot not to index the content of the page. If, however, I wanted the robot to follow any links on the page I would use:

< META NAME=robots CONTENT="noindex,follow" >

An example of this is where I maybe had "printer friendly" pages that would be judged as being duplicate content.

This is my experience only - if you wish to learn more about meta tags try these links in the SEO Links section below, HTML Help by The Web Design Group and W3C.