Search engine optimization for beginners .

Need help to optimize your web pages for the search engines and dont know where to start. Then this introduction will get you started.

Domain
The domain age of a website is important, consider buying a domain already established.
Unless you are willing to wait the 7months to 1year for it to come out of "The sand box".

The Title tag
<title>Web page title</title>
Create title tags with keywords in use on your site and add your site title to the end i.e -
gadget, widgets and software from - www.yoursite.com.

The Description tag
<meta name="description" content="This is a good description">
Describe the contect of your page using your target keywords.

The Keywords tag
<meta name="keywords" content="Enter your keywords relevent to the page">
These are the words that a user types in the search box and these words are linked to the keywords use by your site and others.

The H1 tag
<H1>Page title</H1>
Should always be your page title use only one <H1> tage per page only.

The H2 tag
<H2>Page Content</H2>
Put your page content in these tags

Images Alt text
<img src="url" alt="some alt text which is displayed on mouseover">
Use some text that describe the image in revelancy to the page.

CSS styles
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="website.css" />
Include your css styles as files and not inline as this pushes content down the page which is bad for search engines. And get it validated here

robots.txt
Make yourself a robots text file to exclude and include directories on your site. More info here

Sitemap file
Construct a sitemap file using this tool and tell google about it.

RSS Feed
Get a rss feed of your sites articles etc and use Feedburner to syndicate it.

HTML Code
Use a validation checker to ensure the code is clean and usable- validator here.

If you are a business enclose your full contact details on an easy to find page that has clear information about who you are and what you do. Also make a contact form for email and reply to all emails that you get. I once tried to contact a firm of accounts in my local town by email and waited and waited til I finally phoned them and was told that they never used or answered their email CRAZY people.

Content
Good content that is unique to you and not copied from other peoples sites is best as exact word for word plagism is down marked by the search engines.

Submiting your site
Apply for a link from the three major human edited directories.
dmoz
Yahoo Directory
Best of The Web

Submit to all the major search engines.
Google
Yahoo
MSN

If you have a blog then send a ping to the specialised blog engines -http://pingomatic.com/