A quick visual guide to some simple first steps in optimising sites for search engines.

1. SEO Basics

4. The html <title> tag is consistently rated as the #1 factor in search engine rankings If you do only one thing to improve SEO, meaningful titles should be it.

5. Having a domain name which relates to your main subject is good. Having keywords appended to the URL is not a huge factor, but some engines such as Yahoo like this. Note how this URL suggests a clear logical structure: site -> articles -> particular article. Simple clear site structures are good for users and robots.

6. Meta tags were too easy to abuse are now largely ignored as ranking factors. But the description tag is important as it can supply the text displayed in a listing.

7. The html source of this document itself is very clean. All the style and script is abstracted out, the code is lean, you quickly get to the content: This is good practice for all sorts of reasons, including legibility to search robots.

8. The nav links are simple hrefs, which robots can follow. They cannot follow javascript links, or use site search forms. All important pages need to be accessible by browsing links. H1 H2 Search engines give more weight to keywords in proper headings, this is good usability practice anyway .

9. Keyword use in the actual content is obviously very important… but difficult to manipulate outside of pure marketing contexts. You aren’t going to rewrite a scientific paper or newspaper editorial to be google-friendly. The main thing is to write good content!

10. Good internal links help search engines make sense of your site and boost rankings Quality and relevance of external links is also important. Give links proper text and not ‘ click here ’.

11. Beyond First Base… Now it is about marketing. The main thing Google looks for is how many people link to your site, and the quality and relevance of the referring sites Links from a highly trusted site like the BBC are great. Links from dodgylinkfarm.com are not, and may even harm your ranking The better, more unique and more authoritative your content is, the more likely it is good sites will link to it.

12. Beyond First Base… To get started you could consider using PR services to get into news sites.. ..Or buying keyword advertising..

13. Beyond First Base… … Or get creative!