The most important element in any website business is Search Engine optimisation. Without it, you may as well throw your time and money down the drain.

Think of SEO as the means of making millions of potential clients visit your site. Once there, they may be presented with an opportunity to purchase your goods and services or sign up for your newsletter.

Ranking No. 1 in google is not easy, otherwise everyone would be making millions on the internet. You have to be clever and implement an SEO plan to beat your competition and make you rank above them for your industry keywords.

Keyword research is about discovering the keywords relevant to your business. There are many great tools for this online, some paid subscription like wordtracker, and some free like Google keywords. These tools will generate a list of suggested keywords relevant to your industry.

On site optimization – this means going through all the pages of your site and optimizing each one with keywords discovered from the last step. Link every page with a keyword chosen form the last step and make sure this keyword is in your page titles, H1, H2, H3 tags as well as in the alt descriptions of your pictures.

Try to make the text as natural as possible. Use the keywords naturally and don’t stuff your text with them. Search engine robots may notice this and penalise you if they detect spamming.

Link Building – This is probably the most difficult task you will have to do when optimising your website. The search engines see relevant incoming links pointing to your site as a vote of confidence in your website.

The best way to get links is to create great content for your site that people will link to. Directory and article submissions are other methods people use to gain links, as well as direct solicitations to website owners who share a common goal as you do.

SEO is a black art that takes time and patience. The first aim of your new site should be to create a site that people will like. This is the surest way to be successful in the long run.