SEO (the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimisation) is an important process when developing your website or optimising it afterwards for search engines. Why to do that? Because organic traffic sent by search engines is free and many times more valuable than the traffic you pay for.

How can you do SEO? This is not a mystery, but yet many people have no clue what points to follow. That is why in the rest of this article you will find a checklist for beginners in SEO.

1. Create search engine friendly URLs (SEF)

That means that if you have a webpage with an article about BMW X6 car, you should have that page named after the main keywords of the article or the article name. Look at the example below:

http://www.mysite.com/bmw_x6.html

Note the way the pages in this link is named (bmw_x6.html). These URLs have a stronger position in search engine results when looking for something regarding this car model.

2. Create search engine friendly content

That means a couple of things: unique content in text format (search engines read the text format, if you embed your text in flash or images nothing from your content will be indexed). Do not copy content from another website, as search engines will penalise your ranks for this by not indexing those pages up to not indexing your whole website. If you want however to copy content from others make sure you put the source (a link towards the page your copied).

The content you create must be relevant for your website area.

3. Chose your meta-tags wisely

Meta tags are the first details of a web page search engines tend to index and create the rankings.

Going back to the example above, for an article with details about the BMW X6 model you should include as title tag the article name.

Also, the meta description is important. Create a short description of your article (160-200 characters) and use it as meta description. This is what usually search engines show as content under each result. The description must be relevant to the article, and most words used there should be found in the article content. Also remember, that this description is the one shown in search engines result, the one that anyone gets to read it before choosing to visit the page or not. Therefore having making your description interesting, catchy and making the reader take action and visit the page for more details is highly important.

With the meta descriptions also goes the meta keywords. These keywords should catch the idea of the article, and have a good density in that page. Keywords used as meta keywords MUST be found in the article content by search engines, otherwise it will be considered keyword spamming.

4. Create anchors in your page / website

Whenever referring to BMW X6 in your site make sure to highlight these keywords and link them to the page article. These keywords can also be something different like Top SUV or any other way you want to express to the car. Search engines will link these keywords to the article content, and you can get good results for other keywords as well.

5. Get links to your website

If you have a great valuable content you will surely get other websites link to you. However this is a slow process.

There are also many other ways to get these links. One would be to make link exchange with related websites. Another way would be to submit your website in as many web directories as you can (as you can imagine, these keywords hyperlinked here work as anchors).

Also use the social media to your advantage. Wherever you can post a comment (mainly blogs), do it and have your link inserted in the appropriate field. Make sure to make comments related to the post so you can add value and not spam, and results will be positive.

These would be the main keys to follow for search engine optimisation. You can also read an article about search engine optimisation variables and how they affect differently from a search engine to another.