First Steps in Search Engines Optimisation

You may optimise your site either a page at a time or across the whole site using the techniques we have suggested in this introduction, to help in your quest to achieve a top 20 search engine ranking position. You may even be aiming for a top 10 search engine ranking which is also achievable if you invest the time and effort required to achieve this.
One thing that is beyond doubt is that as a business the high ranking of your site is essential for your online success and online profits may even start to overtake your existing revenue streams from your physical business store front.
There are many techniques that you can utilise but the following techniques and points are viewed across the industry as being the ones that you must first focus on.
Duplication of Content is a big NO. We have found that some owners of sites just copy content from a competitor believing that by copying this they can shorten their own development time and utilise the site optimisation techniques of their competitors. However, in addition to being an intellectual property and copyright infringement it is also extremely counter-productive as the leading search engine including Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and MSN Search, particularly Google, will penalise you for doing this. You could potentially “sandbox” your site which is kind of like putting it in jail so it can’t achieve high rankings, even worse your site could get banned alltogther.

What you should be doing is identifying your key phrases and keywords; this is the first step in optimising your site. You can use a tool called the Overture Keyword Tool or Google Adwords to identify the keywords that you should be targeting on the pages that you are trying to optimise. These should be highly relevant terms that potential customers would be typing in to find a provider of the service or product that you sell. As you will know already not all customers are alike so not all customers will search alike. It is a great opportunity to use these tools to capture these customers.
The second area to start to focus on is that of page titles. We have found that the title for each page of your website is extremely important, as that is the search engine's first check and is used to validate the page when assessing that particular page on your site. Emphasis should be on unique pagenames throughout your site which has a relationship to the content included on that page. It is advisable that he title tag contains no more than 12 words.
As starters the points we have discussed what are golden rules and should structure what you do across you site.