SEO isn't rocket science and the majority of the information you need can be found throughout the web. However, I keep getting asked "What is search engine optimisation?" or "What are the SEO tricks?". I decided to write these guitdelines and as broad outline of the SEO techniques involved.

1. Submit your site to search engines. You have to do this initially otherwise a search engine will not know you exist. Doing this will mean that search engines will know about your site but it doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank highly. The only three search engines I would bother with are Google, Yahoo and Bing.

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Once submitted to Yahoo and Bing you can forget about them. You will get far more traffic from Google and anything you do to improve your rankings in Google will improve them in the others.

2. Start building incoming links Search engines. This will give you higher rankings if there are a lot of other sites linking to your site. Generally these should be “relevant” sites, i.e., sites that are in some way related to yours. Start with free or local directories. Ones to look at first:

http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/add.html

http://www.yell.com/

http://qtype.co.uk

http://thompsonlocal.com

http://www.brownbook.net/

Then it’s just a case of trying to get clients or business partners to link from their site to yours and trying to get links from other sites relevant to your business.

3. Social Networking. Initially just sign up for accounts on twitter, linkedin, facebook and wordpress. You might not use them much at first but they will provide links back to your main site. Further down the line, a quick way of getting search engines to look at a new page on your website is to link to it from all these social networking sites. It’s quite a lot of time and effort to use social networking sites correctly so I wouldn’t bother too much with them for now. Wait and see if you think you need them further down the line

4. Google Maps. This will get your business listed on anything that uses Google maps and also get you listed on Google’s “local” listings, so will rank you higher for anyone doing a regional search. Sign yourself up for an account on Google:

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F&hl=en

Now sign up your site at Google’s local business centre: www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter Fill in as much information as you can as this will rank you higher.

5. SEO – None technical. At the simplest level this means that if you want to rank highly for a search phrase, eg. “Recruitment Consultant Newcastle”. Then the text on the pages on your site needs to include these words, probably multiple times, and if possible in that order. It can get more complicated than that but initially just have a think about what you think the people who would be interested in your services would search for to find you and work that into your pages. Try not to repeat yourself on different pages but try and put some relevant text on your home page which is currently blank. Take special care with your page titles, these will be used in all the important parts of the page as far search engines are concerned. So your titles should be what you think potential customers will search for.

6. SEO - Technical. Apart from the actual text itself, there are more technical ways of using the text that are important to SEO. Some of these you may not have direct control over though so may have to speak to a developer. If I was optimising a page for a certain phrase, ideally I’d like that phrase to appear in the following places: 1. The page url. For example, for your page titled “Recruitment leads” the url is currently “index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemid=19”. This is because you need to enable or install something called url rewriting. What this will do in convert the long meaningless url to something like “Recruitment-leads”. I think this is reasonably straight forward to do on a site based on Joomla 2. Page title. This is what is displayed in the title bar at top of internet explorer. Generally this will just whatever you call the page when you create it. One rule of thumb though, what the page is about is more important than your company. .