A search engine is an online database of websites. Internet users can search for information contained in these databases by "keywords". For example if you were going on holiday to Avignon in France and you needed to hire a car, you might search on "car hire Avignon France".

There are two ways a search engine can find a website to add to its database. The first and most direct method is to accept submissions from the website owner. Most search engines have a "submit your URL" section inviting submission.

The major search engines are:
- Google
- Yahoo
- MSN
- Ask and
- AOL

The three main search engines also have local search engines:
- Google Local
- Yahoo Local and
- MSN Local

Minor search engines include:
- Lycos
- AllTheWeb
- Netscape and
- A9

A search on one of the search engines for "search engines" will bring up a huge number of search engines. You can either make a list yourself and submit your URL or many companies will do this for you on a monthly basis for a small fee. If you take the second route I would suggest doing your research and find a reputable company. In terms of benefit v time spent, you would do better making sure you are listed on the top few search engines and then to focus on link building (more information on this below).

The second is to use software to find and gather information about your website. This software examines the code of your website and looks for links pointing to and from your site. This software is most commonly called spiders - because they crawl the "web". These spiders attempt to understand what is important about your website and its place in the global market. Each search engine has slightly different software. Therefore, your website will rank differently on different search engines when the same keyword search is done on each search engine. When a spider encounters a new URL it will be added to the search engine's database.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making a website search engine friendly. SEO can be split into two distinct parts Page optimization which is all about making your website easy to read by the search engines (spiders) with interesting and relevant content and Link optimisation which is about obtaining as many links from other relevant websites to your website so that your website is seen as "popular".

The aim of SEO is to get your website ranked as highly as possible in the search engine results when someone searches on a particular keyword. For example, our aim is to get www.berapt.co.uk on the first page of search results when someone searches for "gifts". Often website designers do not create a website with page optimisation in mind.

Often website designers don't create a website with page optimisation in mind, so it's important to have a basic understanding of page optimisation yourself before you start. This way you can make sure your designer can optimise your website for the search engines or, if not, it will allow you to look for another designer who can or engage an SEO specialist to work along side your designer in creating your website.

One thing to remember is that although you should keep page optimisation in mind when designing your website you shouldn't forget that your website is primarily there to be read by people, so don't sacrifice good design and content for the sake of a page that is only optimised for the search engines.

There are many factors that help make a website easy to read and some are best left to the experts to implement. In addition, the importance of each factor can vary between search engines and over time as the search engines continually update the software they use to find and gather information for their databases. However, here are a few simple strategies you really must implement to ensure you get off to a good start.

1. Title Meta tag
The title tag is what displays as the headline in the search engine results pages. You can find yours by opening your website and clicking View Source - the meta tags are placed between the HEAD delineations.

The title tag should be easy to read and designed to bring in traffic. As such your main keywords and key phrases should be included toward the beginning of the tag. Don't make the mistake of putting your company name first. Unless you're already a household name, people are unlikely to be searching on your company name. Your title tag should express what you do or in other words what you think people would be likely to key into a search engine in order to find your products and services. For example the title tag for BeRapt is "unique and personalised gifts - berapt"

2. Description Meta tag
The description tag is the paragraph that people see when your page comes up in the search results. Make sure that it is easy to read and adequately describes your website in such a way that it compels the person to visit your website. If you don't have a description tag the search engines may display the first text on your page and very often this may not make sense due to the way the search engines read the text on your webpage.

3. Keywords Meta tag
This should include your main keywords and key phrases but remember not to repeat the words otherwise it can look like you are spamming. You should choose your keywords and phrases well. If you use extremely competitive keywords such as "gifts" then you will find it extremely difficult to get to the top of the search engines rankings. There is a concept called Long Tail marketing. Essentially this means choosing keyword phrases which aren't as competitive but still get a considerable number of hits. It is also said that there is a higher conversion rate for long tail keyword phrases i.e. someone searching on a very competitive keyword "vacations" is probably simply browsing, whereas someone searching on "beach holidays in turkey" has probably narrowed down there vacation choices and are now looking to by that holiday. You're probably wondering where you can get information to firstly help you find long tail keyword phrases and secondly find out how many hits a day those phrases are getting. I have found a great website called keywordtracker.com that will provide you with all this information and you can test it out with their free trial.

4. Internal navigation
The placement and organisation of the navigation of your website is critical to keeping potential customers on your website. Customer satisfaction statistics state that up to 95% of visitor frustration comes from inadequate navigation methods.

Numerous studies have been done as to where the best place is on a page to insert your navigation. The answer is that it doesn't really matter as long as it is consistently placed throughout the website. People should always know how to get back to information they have already seen as well as knowing how to find the information they have yet to read. The homepage button should be in the same place on the page regardless of where you are on the site. I have utilised a breadcrumb navigation system which is on the same place on every page in the site and which shows my customers where they are and where they have been.

It is important to note that internal navigation (including a sitemap) is also very important in terms of Google PageRank, which is discussed later under Link Optimisation.

5. Image tags
The small yellow box that comes up when your mouse hovers over an image is called an ALT tag. You should make sure that every image on your website has an alt tag which contains your keywords or phrases.

6. Text links for images
Search engine spiders can't follow image links. In addition to having image links you should have text links either under the image or elsewhere on the page. The text a person sees when looking at a link is called the link text. You can see an example here of my image link (with Alt tags) and text links.

7. Header tags
It is not enough to merely bold your text headlines. You should use header tags followed by descriptive body text. The text on each page is given more weight by the search engines this way.

8. Relevant content
The golden rule is that first and foremost the content on your website must appeal to the people reading it. Don't make the mistake of trying to write your content for the search engines. It will only end up sounding phoney and you will end up losing any customers you get. Keyword rich, but not saturated content is the key. An additional reason to include well written informational content is that some of the search engines are using or moving toward using Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. When a person searches on say "pasta" the search engines will look for webpages including the word pasta but also words related to pasta such as spaghetti, carbohydrates and Italian. This ensures that the search engines provide the person with the most informational webpages associated with their search.

Each page in your website should have about 250 to 500 words and be focused on one specific product or subject. Too few words and the search engines won't consider it relevant, too many and the spiders may find it difficult to determine the subject of the page. Focusing on one product or subject will allow you to rank highly for keywords relevant to that product or subject. Try to ensure this content is near the top of the source code.

9. Fresh content
Update your content regularly to encourage the search engine spiders to visit your website more often.

10. External CSS and JavaScript files
One of the factors that search engines consider when ranking a website is the percentage of code relevant to a search term. It's no use ensuring you have content relevant to your keywords if you then fill the page up with code. CSS and JavaScript can take up hundreds of lines of code, minimizing the importance of the text code on your website. Put CSS and JavaScript code in separate files and then simply include them in your pages by reference. You can reduce hundreds of lines of code down to one and increase the amount of code in that file/page that is relevant content.

11. Search engine friendly URLs
The search engines have difficulty reading unfriendly dynamic URLs which commonly arise as a result of using a Content Management System that isn't designed with SEO in mind. An unfriendly URL looks like www.berapt.co.uk/product.php?productid=47. It is relatively easy to fix these URLs. You simply have to do some research to find software that can be applied to your system. A search engine friendly URL would look something like www.bbq-set-pr-47.html.

This is an issue I have with the BeRapt website and with the help of my website designer I have found appropriate software for my Content Management System and am waiting for it to be implemented.

There are two reasons for creating a network of links that point to your site. Firstly, it's the simplest, easiest and most cost effective way of building traffic. Secondly, it is a major factor in determining a website's position in the search engine results pages. Generally, a site with more inbound links will be positioned higher than a similar site with fewer inbound links. However, it's not all about quantity. The quality of the links is equally important as is the anchor text you use.

In terms of quality, the search engines will give more weight to a link from a "popular" website (i.e. one with a high pagerank) than a link from a website with no pagerank. It's like deciding whether to go to a restaurant recommended by a food critic or one recommended by joe public - you would obviously give more weight to the recommendation by the food critic and the search engines follow this same formula.

The search engines also put a significant amount of weight on the anchor text of inbound links. Anchor text can be a decisive factor when going after top ranking on extremely competitive search terms. Anchor text is the text on the page that when you click on, links you through to the URL specified. For example, "gifts" is the anchor text in the following link which links to the BeRapt website gifts. Your anchor text should be the keyword you are trying to rank highly for in the search engines. As noted above, I wouldn't suggest using the name of your website unless you are a well-recognised brand. However, I would recommend using long tail keyword phrases.

Most of the major search engines support the "link:" operator, which means that if you type link: in front of your URL, it should return the total link count for your URL. You will notice that the totals vary greatly from search engine to search engine. This is because the figures shown represent the number of inbound links that are known to that search engine (which will vary based on the size of their database). In addition, most of the search engines (Google especially) apply various filters against the inbound links; therefore, some inbound-links may not be counted toward the total.

The three main ways of generating inbound links to your website are directories, article submission and press release submission.

A directory is a search tool similar to a search engine but with a few major differences. Directories tend to employ human editors to review and rank websites submitted to their database. Yahoo! is the most well known example of a directory. Most directories catalog websites based on a variety of topic categories such as Business and economics or Arts and Culture.

You can find a fantastic list of free directories at www.addurl.nu, which are ordered by PageRank. It is important to remember that although the home page of these directories may be say PR6, the page from which you get your inbound link, say in the Shopping/Gifts category may have a much lower PageRank and in some cases it may be 0. So it pays to pick your category accordingly. If your website fits into more than one category, chose the one with the higher PageRank.

When you are entering your details in to the directories, make sure you include your keywords where possible in the "Title" section. In general, this will become the anchor text for your link. Don't make the mistake I did and use your business name as the Title i.e. "BeRapt". If you can manage to get a longtail keyword phrase in their great, if not you might like to try something similar to what I did%u2026I changed to use Gifts at Be Rapt as my title so I at least I got "gifts" in there. I'm not sure if it will help, but it's go to be better than just "BeRapt"!

A well written article can be submitted to so called 'article warehouses' for mass coverage or can be targeted more specifically at industry association sites or journals that relate to your profession. Each article you submit will include a 'resource box' at the end of the article. This area is where the real value lies. In this box you can include a short bio on yourself or your company and most importantly a link (remember to choose the right anchor text for your link) back to the web page of your choice.

This covers off two important factors that the search engines love, firstly there is an inbound link to your site and secondly, assuming you have written an article relevant to what you are promoting on your website, the link will come from a page with content relevant to the content on your website.

Once submitted, anyone is entitled to download your article as long as the resource box is left intact. So, if your article is popular i.e. is downloaded and used on other peoples websites, your one article will generate many more inbound links.