It can all be a bit daunting when we first realize the importance of optimizing our site for search engines.

After all by this stage we probably have just finished designing our first website and were feeling quite proud of our new baby.

The truth is, designing a site is just trhe first step on a long and often tricky road to dominating search results (SERPS : search engine result pages).

First of all we need to make our site easy to read, not just by humans but also by search engine robots or ’spiders’.

If you are not sure how to do this, visit the W3c Validator Service and enter your site’s web address.

Unless you are a design genius, the chances are there will be a number of errors showing, depending upon the DOCTYPE you are using.

Try to reduce these as far as possible. Clean code is always best.

Next you will need to make sure that your page title is relevant to the type of search terms you would like your page to show up for in Google and other major search engines.

Your page will benefit from a few well placed META tags, although these are not as critical as they once were. A ‘keywords’ tage and more importantly a well written’description’ tag are probably still worthwhile. There is plenty of information available on the web  if you are struggling with these. We do intend to have more articles later on that will describe META syntax in more detail.

Next take a long careful look at the text on your page that can be viewed by those reading it. Make sure that you have a few well-chosen keywords that fit in with you title within the body of the text. Earlier on in the page content is best of all.

If you do not have much text on your page consider adding a few paragraphs at least. Sites with very little content on their front page often are not given as much weight in SERPS as those that do.

If you have a few images on the page then within the coding of the page give them ‘alt’ tags. These are descrition tags that tell a search engine what the picture is about. You may have seen this in action when browsing other pages. When you hover your mouse over an image on a page a little text box appears with a description of the image.

When you are happy that all the above has been achieved, then submit your site two the big three search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN, To do this in Google just open Google and in the search box type ‘addurl google’. You will soon find googles page for submitting your webpage. Don’t forget to add the ‘http://’ before the www.yourwebpage.com.

To submit to Yahoo you will need to open a free account first, log in, then follow the same proceedure as above, except with ‘addurl yahoo’.

MSN are at time of writing offering a free submission service as well. Just follow the same proceedure as before.

So far, so good.

Next you will need to publicize your site and make it look more desirable to Google et al.

The way to do this is by obtaining a fair number of one-way good quality back links to youe site.

How to approach this will be covered in Part 2.