by Barry Dewar

Created on: May 20, 2008

Making your website easy for your customers to find should be no.1 in your list of priorities when you build it. Search Engine Optimisation is a term which is bandied about a lot and there are people who will be quite happy to charge you a princely sum to do just that once your site has been built. The good news is that you can save yourself that money by thinking about your site's visibility and employing a few simple techniques before you even start building the thing.

There are over 100 million websites on the Internet and that number is growing almost exponentially. Many of them are just like yours. They are selling the same sort of thing or offering the same information. If you're going to stand out in such a vast crowd you're going to have to do some planning. So here are my top 10 tips on how to keep your name in the frame.

1/ Start with the domain name.
First off, make sure yours is relevant and concise. Also, it's very important that you get the country of origin right or your traffic will be limited. If you are not a US company then you should not be using .com, at least not on it's own.

2/ Decide your keywords.
This isn't going to be easy. Open up Google and start searching for your chosen keywords. Steer clear of the ones which bring back the most results as the competition is too strong. Get creative in thinking about what people might enter into search engines when looking for what you're offering.

3/ Craft your content.
And by content I mean text. Search engines don't really care about images, they scan your text and catalogue it. Use plenty of descriptive text but keep it short and simple at the same time. Make sure you use your keywords around 5 time per 100 words and make sure you use include them in your page titles.

4/ Think links.
Link popularity is very important to search engines. Find plenty of sites who's offerings compliment yours (steer clear of direct competitors) and offer them a link exchange. Also, find the directories that deal with your services and get your links on there. What you want is links going out and coming back to your site. You can use Google Toolbar to check page ranks.

5/ Include a site map.
Even if your site is not that big you should make sure you include a site map which is linked from and to every page. This allows the search engines easy access to the whole site. If you really think your site is too small to merit it, then make sure your navigation is permanently available.

6/ Describe your images.
You can't avoid using

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