SEO - Read all about it........

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is big business these days, with people banging on the doors trying to get their sites to the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN etc.

Like most things in the internet world, it's one of those things that a lot of people think they can't do for themselves and they need to get a pro in to do.

The truth though is that with a bit of work you can get more than respectable results in all of the major search engines without spending any money at all.

There are numerous articles telling you different ways of achieving success, many of them contradicting each other and confusing to read about, but don't be afraid to play around with what you think will work for you.
Try different methods on different pages and monitor through your stas package what and where traffic is coming from.

One site I maintain was getting about 700 hits a week, which I appreciate is quite a low traffic site but looking through my traffic report for the site it was clear to see 95% of the traffic was coming from direct entry. In other words people knew the web address and were entering it straight into the address bar of their browser, hardly surprising when the web address is widely advertised in a local newspaper.

I talked to the owners of the site and asked if I could make a couple of suggestions and amend a few things with the pages.
Just 2 weeks since making the changes the traffic pattern to the site has changed tremendously and now there is a lot more traffic hitting the site. Only 48% of that traffic now enters directly by entering the url. The amount visiting from search engines is still low, approx 6%, but that will take longer than 2 weeks to have an effect, but the most significant change is the amount of traffic hitting us from other sites.

What did I do?? I hear you ask, well it's no big secret.
I amended all the usual, meta tags, changed the Title tag (much more important than people realise!), and wanted to begin the most important step........ link building.
Some people spend hours going into forums etc trying to post links to their site, I don't find this as beneficial as it once was and is just too time consuming to do these days, I figure if what we are offering is good enough our users will do that bit for us anyway!
Think of something that other sites will be interested in, run a competiton , that will get competition sites etc finding your page and their users will click through to you.
These easy steps will get you on the way, of course there's a lot more to SEO than this but it's a half decent start.

Some other ideas are to submit articles to the likes of digg or Fark.com
One site I work on which averages about 15,000 hits a day recently got 60,000 in one day to one story which got listed on fark!!!

Have an opinion and air it! People love the internet as a discussion tool, stir them up!!

A great site I've recently started reading through which can give you much better and much more information about seo is http://seonoobs.com/ take a look.