SEO Made Easy: 10 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips for Your Website

With millions of websites out there, and with many, many more new ones going online each month it can be difficult to get your site noticed.

Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, is the process of optimizing your website for search engines. While search engine algorithms (basically, that's what search engines like Google and Yahoo! are looking for) may change slightly over the years, there are some basics things that search engines' spiders like and have remained constant.

Here are the top 10 SEO tips that have been proven over the years. If you use these tips, chances are that over time you'll see more hits from search engines if you have a good site. However, you must remember SEO is not a one time process and the increase in traffic won't happen overnight. You should constantly be trying to improve your site, adding and updating content - all with SEO in mind.

Create Good Content - Good, well written content is essential. Ensure your content is unique and makes good use of keywords. But be careful not to stuff your content with keywords. Search engines don't buy products or request more information, people do. Therefore, ensure you're writing for your audience - humans - and in clear English.

Use Unique and Relevant Page Titles - Each page of your website should have a unique page title. The title should be three or four keywords describing what the page contains.

Optimize URLS for Search Engines - URLS like "yousite.com/page2.html" mean nothing to a search engine. Rather, a URL that tells users (and the search engine) what your page contains like "yoursite.com/widget-reviews.html" is much better. Also note that you should use hyphens between words rather than underscores as search engines count hyphens as spaces.

Create a Site Map - Help search engine crawlers find every page on your site. A site map is just a page on your site (often linked to from the main page) that lists all the pages on your site together with a link to each page. You should limit the number of links on this page to around 50.

Start a Blog - Google loves sites that have links to it from a blog. If you don't want to start a blog, you can always find blogs that share the same interest as your site and comment on those blogs and use your URL in the comment. If you do this, be sure your comments are genuine comments and relate to what you're commenting on and not just spam for your site.

Link and Get Linked - Having links to your site, especially when the sites linking to you have a high Google page rank, tell search engines that your site is a site legitimate and good. After all, why would other sites risk a lower ranking in a search engine for linking to a spam website? Links from sites that have a high Google PR (page rank) are the ultimate for SEO.

Use Keywords as Links - When you have a "click here" link on your page, it does nothing for a search engine crawler. However, a link anchored with keyword text tells the crawler what the link contains. For example, if you're selling red widgets, don't say "clink here" to buy the widget; rather, use the text "buy red widgets."

Use Image ALT Tags - Use the ATL tags of images to put in keywords that relate to that image. Rather than using the default name of the image "such as image005.jpg" use keywords like "picture of purple widget" instead. Notice the word "picture' is included in the tag. Many people searching for pictures include the word "picture" in their search. Use the word "picture" every time in your ATL tags.

Use Social Media Sites - Drive traffic to your site by creating a MySpace or Facebook page for your site. If you're in the service industry, join Yahoo! Answers and post response to questions thereby presenting yourself and your site, as a leader in your field.

Submit your URL - After you've followed the above steps, you're ready to submit your site to the search engines. Submit your site to Google using "Add a New URL" feature. Google will crawl your site within a few weeks. A quicker way to get Google to crawl your site is have it linked from a website with a PR higher than 6.