SEO = search engine optimization. Good search results are essential to your site. Many people do not go beyond the first page of the results pages so you need to ensure that your site is search engine optimised or you wont get any traffic never mind the right sort of traffic – traffic that brings you business that is.

So what are the things you need to do to have a chance to rank well? As every search engine has a different “algorithm” (which just means a mathematical rule or procedure for solving a problem) and each “algorithm” has literally hundreds of inputs this may seem like an impossible question to answer. And to answer it with 100% accuracy is impossible but there are certain things that have a major effect that you must do just to stand a chance.

1. Make sure that your site is technically sound and well built with plain English page titles rather than: sessionid=4D6BE5993FFF956660C27184A2F39E81.TC30a?__frame=_top and with all “non HTML” code (HTML = Hypertext Markup Language and is the basic language used to write web pages) called in from separate directories.

2. Choose keywords and phrases very carefully. Keywords should be the words that customers actually use to find your site when using a search engine. Amazingly most people just ignore this basic fact and never get any research done on the subject!!! That's like turning up to the airport with no money, no ticket and no passport and expecting to get on a plane – in other words: nuts!

3. Once you know what keywords to use write a page with a relevant page title for each keyword or phrase using simple language with variations of the keyword or phrase to reach a keyword density of about 5 – 8% and about 500 words per page minimum with paragraphs that use tags in their sub headings. Make sure that your keyword(s) or phrase(s) appear in each of your pages' "meta tags”. Make sure that ll you photos have descriptions.

4. Find a way to build up the relevant links to your site from other sites. Search engines view inbound links as a vote for your site. Therefore, in general, the more incoming links to relevant parts of your site from relevant “anchor text” (the visible text in a hyperlink you click to go to another page or website) on other sites the higher your page will rank, but the linking sites must be relevant and links from disreputable sites can harm your ranking.

5. Continually add new content. Sites that continually add new content and new pages get better rankings because search engines like new relevant content. Search engines' “spiders” or “web crawlers” are a program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that then indexes those pages to provide fast searches. Spiders are always on the lookout for fresh content.

6. Put up a site map which shows every page on the site and has a link to it. This will help the search engine robots find every page. If you are updating regularly then an XML site map for Google that “pings” Google about every update should be added too.

7. Make sure you have basic management information about the site – how many visitors, where they go, where they leave etc. Arguably this is just as important as the site itself as it allows you to improve it based on actual results.

8. Finally – build a site for people that is interesting to people. No point in being at the top of the search engines if people just refuse to stay or buy!!! People generally stay on sites that are relevant to what they are looking for at the time, are easy to navigate, easy to read and easy to buy from. Whilst they like “prettily designed” sites form tend to be less important than relevance and ease of use.They also like interacting via chat rooms or watching relevant “movies”.