Custom website design and search engine optimisation uk - for businesses in Gloucestershire, the South West and Midlands

2. Start your search engine optimisation by researching the keyphrases people are using to find sites in your market. This is a critical first step - your target keyphrases are those that you will optimise for. If you get this wrong, you'll waste a lot of time writing content and building links, only to attract the wrong people to your site. You can use keyword resources such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Google Adwords and YahooSearch Marketing data. Never rely on guesswork when deciding on your target keywords. As an insider, you're likely to use completely different terms or jargon in your market. By compiling a list of genuine search terms and building pages that target one or two each, you'll attract the right people to your site. Avoid one or two word phrases too - the more specific the phrase, the more likely it is to be used a genuine buyer and the better your chances of getting a sale.

3. Don't try to fool the search engines by 'spamming' your text and meta tags with your keywords. If they discover this, they'll ban you but, more importantly, you should be optimising your site for your visitors, not for the search engines. There's no point in getting good search rankings if the content you deliver is a lot of repetitive guff. Search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their search box. If people type in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimise your site so that when your target visitors arrive, they are compelled to act. If you don't know who your target audience is, find out. Look for web sites, forums and blogs that provide demographic information, and check out places online where your target audience might be active and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your web marketing and your search engine optimisation in particular.

4. Design and label your site architecture and navigation based on the results of your keyword research. Your market may think of your products or services in a way that relates to age, lifestyle, season and all sorts of factors. Use these as ways of communicating that you're on their wavelength - name your links, your navigation and products accordingly. One tip is to use seasonal factors - for example, people often serch for gifts with a seasonal or other pre-fix such as 'Christmas' or 'wedding'. Use such behaviour to your advantage by creating pages that target these phrases and deliver great, relevant content.

5. Make sure every page on your site can be indexed by the search engines - at least every page that you want indexed. Search engine 'spiders' can't complete forms, can't search your site, can't read JavaScript links and menus, and can't interpret graphics and Flash. This doesn't mean that you can't use these things on your site but you need to provide alternate means of navigating your site.You'll need HTML links in the main navigation on every page which links to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you'll need to have HTML links to the individual product/service pages.

6. Write interesting and persuasive content for the key pages of your site using your target keyword phrases and addressing your target market's needs, and make sure it's copy that the search engines can "see." This is an essential element of search engine optimisation - the search engines need to read your keywords on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This content should be clearly visible and programmed into the html of your site where the spiders can find it. Don't worry too much about 'keyword density'. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason will look contrived and may even put people off.

7.Label your internal text links and the 'alt tags' behind your images clearly and descriptively. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (known as the anchor text) to understand what they're going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. From a search engine optimisation angle, writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive means that you can describe the page you're pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.

8. The first place that the search engines look for clues as to what your pages are about are the meta Title tags. It's therefore important to include your keyword phrases into each page's unique Title tag. Don't use the same Title tag for each page - if you do, the spiders may index only one of your pages. Remember that the information that you place in this tag and in the Descroption tag are what will appear as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it's on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your content.

9. Create a site that other sites will want to link to. Links to your site are a critical to any successful search engine optimisation campaign because search engines regard inbound links as 'votes'. Having links from any old site is almost worthless. The search engines will check whether the sites linking to you are relevant to what you offer - they'll even check the pages linking to the pages that link to you! It also pays to get links from pages with a good 'Google Page Rank' (you can see any page's GPR by downloading the Google toolbar onto your browser). Having links from pages that are relevant to your site and have a decent GPR will be a critical element of your search optimisation efforts - it takes time to build them but is well worth the effort.

10. Make sure you measure how your traffic changes after your first search engine efforts. Check how many unique visits you get daily, which pages they visit and what search terms they used. Don't be too concerned about your rankings for particular phrases - if you optimise for a good number of well targeted phrases, you'll build a steady flow of visitors who are looking for precisely what you offer. And don't stop optimising - your competitors won't!