Basically there are two steps involved when optimizing your website for search engines.
Web Standards & Search Engine Friendly Websites
The first step is to make sure that your website follows web standards. Your website should validate to web standards set up by the w3 consortium . This is important for search engines to be able to index your website correctly.
This also includes selecting the correct elements for the information put up on your website. For example Headers should go into headers tags. Also very important is that all of the pages on a website has a main header (h1), a descriptive title and a summary of the content of the website and keywords in meta tags.
Also important is to add title attributes to all links and alternative texts to images.
You can test how any existing website conforms to web standards at the w3c validator.
At Lamu Software we refer to the initial search engine optimization as making your website search engine friendly. All websites created by Lamu Software are search engine friendly.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When your website has been up for a month or two it is time to see how the site can be optimized for search engines. In order to do this we need some statistics of visits to your site. We use Google Analytics to analyze statistics for all websites we create since it has a very user friendly interface.
Using Google Analytics we can see where visitors come from, how they ended up on your website, what keywords they used if they came from a search engine. Using this information we make small adjustments to text and keyword on your website.
SEO is an ongoing process and for sites with a large number of pages it is important to optimize pages on a regular basis. For smaller sites where content rarely changes we recommend spending a small amount on on-line advertising using Google Adwords or a similar service – instead of spending a lot of money on SEO.
The best way to attract traffic to your site is actually to continuously add new content and maintain existing content.
