There are many great SEO tips knocking about the internet. We’ve compiled a quick list of top 10 tips for optimising your website:

1. Identify Correct Keywords

   Every Internet marketing campaign should start with identifying the keywords that are searched for, and are relevant to what your website offers. You should consider keywords that your prospective clients would key into the major search engines.

2. Don’t Try To Trick Search Engines

   Here is the best-kept trick in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): There are no tricks. The key technique is to maintain standard based practices, and develop a website rich in resources to your target market.

   Don’t spam, don’t use hidden text, avoid link farms, and don’t cram your keyword descriptions and META tags with keywords. The penalties will far outweigh the short-lived advantages.

3. Ensure navigation is structured

   A high-quality link structure on your site will ensure search engine spiders (and end-users) can find and index all pages on your site.

   Not every visitor will start at your home page, but most will and it is important to check that each page on your site is linked to the others. This helps the search engine spiders to quickly index all the content on your site.

4. Develop Inbound Links

   Developing high quality, relevant links to your site is vital to achieving prominent search engine rankings. They are used by Search Engines to evaluate how valuable a website is and consequently where the site should be ranked.

   Submitting your website to online directories can be a very useful method of increasing targeted visits to your site. You should also seek inbound links from other relevant and well regarded websites.

   Linking from text  rich with your keywords placed in the body of other websites is very valuable. Try to be selective when choosing link partners. Certain sites, known as “link farms”, can harm your ranking and may even result in you being blacklisted by the major search engines.

5. Optimise Page Titles

   Use your selected keywords in your page titles – What you place between <title> and </title> in the HTML for your web page is critical. Use your keywords, avoid prepositions and conjunctions where possible (the, and, for, with, etc.) and watch your punctuation within the title. Using only dashes between phrases in a title seems to help.

   Ensure each page has a unique title tag. This will assist your search engine rankings and help users to find the relevant information they were looking for.

6. Fresh, Unique Content

   Why do you have a website? Is it to provide information or entertainment? Is it to promote your business? Do you have an online shop?

   Whatever the function of your website, it is unlikely to be there just to attract search engine bots. Websites that are designed for people, offering easy navigation and fresh, unique content will attract search engine spiders that will want to index the pages.Visiting a site for timely information, only to find that it hasn’t been updated for weeks can be frustrating.

7. Meta Tags

   There is much debate regarding the value of META tags. They are certainly not a very valuable method of SEO any more, but some search engines still regard META tags as important when ranking your site whilst others ignore them.

   The best advice is to still include META tags as part of your SEO strategy, but to understand that they are not the be-all-and-end-all, as some would have you believe.

8. Optimise Every Page

   Each page should be optimised for the content it contains. The index page is undoubtedly one of the most important pages of your website, but search engines see the internet as a collection of web-pages not websites.

   Optimising each page relevantly will allow potential visitors to find the information they are looking for. Ensure you have links between pages to ensure that you whole site is indexed. That way you will be in a position to compete for more than one keyword in order to attract people searching for your goods and services.

9. Include A Site Map

   A site map, in addition to a clear navigation bar and links between pages, will help visitors to your website find what they are looking for. It will also ensure that search engine spiders visit and index each of your pages.

   You can create a HTML sitemap or, alternatively it can be generated through Google or other web applications.

10. Beware of over-use of Flash and Java!

    There are a few tricks to optimise flash and javascript for search engines, however they certainly don’t command as much rank as plain old HTML content. By all means use Flash and Javascript but be conservative! Avoid placing important segments of your info into  flash sections and instead use it as means of decoration rather than content. Externalise javascript to ensure your websites code isn’t bloated with irrelevent content, and ensure any links in flash have standard HTML counterparts.