Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important aspect of online marketing. It is really worth your while to go out and learn more about it you haven’t already. It will help your general understanding of the how the Web works a great deal.

I thought I would give a run down of the basics, and a few tips that I think are important to know if you’re a beginner at SEO.

Let’s start with the basics:

• What is SEO? “SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines” (taken from SEOmoz’ beginners guide).
• Why it can be beneficial: Most of the Web traffic is driven by the major search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN. If your site cannot be found on them you are missing out on valuable traffic. By optimising your site you will be able to drive the most relevant and useful traffic that provides you with the right type of publicity and revenue.
• Why can’t your site be recognised without SEO? Making content available to search engines will boost your rankings, help your content be found more readily, and be more visible instead of being buried in the bottom rankings.
• How does it work? Search engine spiders crawl the web to find the most relevant results for a users search query. In a nutshell your site is ranked based on the relevancy of your content (similar to PPC in that way) and if you have good links to quality (relevant) websites.

The initial steps to follow:

Site design is really important, not only for SEO purposes but for general usability. Your site needs to be easy to navigate around so that users find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Some tips to follow include:

• When creating a website, create your content (information that will be in your website) around themes.
• Start with main themes and work your way down from there.
• A main theme should have content around the major areas of your business - and would include high volume search terms (for example terms relating to your business in general).
• These main themes should follow onto secondary and tertiary themes.
• These would have content around the more specialised areas of your business (for example the products that you offer).
• By doing this you have already created a base for SEO.
• Try and avoid flash if you have an ROI focused business, as it may distract users from completing the end goal.
• Always assess what goals you want to achieve first from users entering you website.

The next step is to make sure that the content on your site will appear in the rankings when searched for. This is done through keyword research:

• Keyword research can be based on the themes that you have created.
• You need to base each of your themes around 2 or 3 keywords that are relevant and popular search terms for your business. The first one should be the most high volume keywords, whilst number 2 and 3 should be less in volume.
• The same will apply for secondary and tertiary themes. It is most likely that the keywords for you secondary and tertiary themes will not be as high volume as those from the main theme (as they are more specialised).
• Remember to include these keywords in your meta tags, so when Google crawls your site they will recognise the keywords in your content and meta tags; making it more relevant.

Fresh content is key. Writing fresh and quality content regularly will keep your visitors coming back, and when spiders notice you update regularly they will visit your site more. Your content must be of value to human visitors as that is what search engines are constantly looking for.

Link Building: Links are an important part of SEO and can be seen as sort of a promotion of your website. It is important to find natural link building processes, as search engines are becoming more aware of artificial link building techniques. The aim of link building is to improve search engine rankings by growing the number and quality of links that point to a website. Some tips include:

• Make sure you regularly check links to your site by doing a back link analysis. You need to check that they are linking to the most relevant page of your site. There is no point in having a link to an irrelevant page, you want your site to be as reputable as possible.
• Make sure you have 4 or more internal links from each page. This may sound daunting but by creating fresh content regularly, you will always have new stuff to link from.
• Try get your site listed onto the quality directories like Yahoo Directory, DMOZ directory, EDU and GOV domains. They will provide your site with quality links and you will be seen as a reputable site, which will boost your rankings.
• For some good link building ideas, click here.

Things to consider:

It is important to remember that SEO takes time. There are no immediate results. You may only see your ranking improving in a couple of months, but this does not mean that your SEO efforts are not fruitful. Keep track of your keyword rankings, and number of links. 
For accurate tracking you should have Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for your website. This will allow you to delve deep into what is happening on your site.
Constantly working on ideas to improve your site ranking is key. Always keep up with trends and what people are searching for right now, and try relate that to your site. That way you will always have traffic coming into your site.