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In the first place optimizing your site for the search engines is a job that takes time. But here are the most essential steps to take in the short-term.

1. Get a Relevant Domain Name

Ideally your domain has one or more keywords. Get a domain name that’s relevant to your content. Special characters will confuse search engine spiders ànd people.

2. Offer Original and Quality Content

Search engines punish sites that rip content from other websites, and rewards websites that have a lot of unique content as well as frequent content additions and updates. Don’t just stuff your content with keywords, as search engines can consider content to have too much keywords as well. On the other hand, make sure you have some keyword density. Make the content relevant to these keywords though. But don’t forget that in the end your website is going to be read by people. The content should in the first place appeal to living persons and not just search engine robots.

3. Get Linked

Search engines determine the relevancy of your website around certain keywords by looking at the links that point to your website. Determine your keywords and the sites that score high rankings when searching for these keywords. Try to get links on those websites to your website.

Getting links on websites that have nothing to do with your own content results in a search engine penalty, so don’t just go around adding links to your site on just any website.

4. Use Title and Meta Tags

Your Title Tag is what shows up when you appear in the search engine listing. This is your advertising space, so use this sentence wisely. Insert keywords or a description that will compell people to click on the link. Meta tags make your site appear in the first place, so use these to differentiate each page separately. Ideally, every separate page has separate content in its meta and title tags.

5. Use HTML

Search engines have a hard time understanding programming code. The best way to get your site fully indexed is simply using HTML. Websites built completely in Flash are to be avoided.

6. Get a Blog

Search engines love blogs (if they get updated regularly). They also offer a chance to divert a bit from your original subject, and to get your site labelled relevant for more topics.

7. Make navigation easy

As well as for people as well as for search engine spiders, make sure all your pages are easily accessible. Don’t make your navigation unnecessary complicated. An ideal tool is a sitemap, that quickly indexes all the links on your site, which will help the spider to find all your pages. Check out our articles on sitemaps or advanced ways of using your sitemap to get higher rankings.