Before you do anything else review your website and the individual web pages it contains:

• Ensure that you have a set of keywords (and key phrases) that accurately reflect the terms that you think your website visitors might use to find your website in a search. Make sure that these keywords are included into a “keywords” meta tag on every page in your site. Similarly, ensure that all your web pages include a “description” meta tag. These 2 tags are not used by all web bots but they are used by many of them as part of the indexing of your website.
• Review your page content and ensure that the keywords you have selected are also used in the text on your website’s home page. This reinforces the value of the keywords for those bots that look for this feature and also makes the terms available for those bots which only index content.
• Try to use the keywords and phrases you selected above in the title tag on your web pages.
• Consider the relationship of text and graphical content in your website. Remember that web bots index text. Ensure that all your images have appropriate content for the “alt” tag. Try to place keywords onto the hyperlinks from your home page.
• You should also consider the structure of your website. Are all the pages in your site easy to find? Do you have a sitemap page? Is the sitemap page accessible from your website’s home page? A good menu system on every page in your website and an easily accessible sitemap can do wonders for navigation within your site and make it easy for a bot to find and index all your web pages.

• they start at one site with a large number of links to other websites such as a directory like the Open Directory
• they follow every link they come across, indexing each page as they go
• then they recursively follow every link on every page they find and index those pages, and so on ...

Getting a good page rank on a search engine is a different problem. Page rank is the thing which determines the position of your website in a set of search results in, for example, a Google search. If a search engine can’t find your website by itself through crawling the internet then you have no inbound links. In this case you will never achieve a decent ranking in a search engine.

So how do you acquire inbound links? Start with the web directories such as Yahoo Directory if you can afford a paid service, or Open Directory which is used by Google. Your site should be crawled within 3-6 months.

Another avenue for building inbound links is to join a forum (you can find an extensive list at the Webmaster Forum List ) and start making some posts. Search engines love forums but you need to make sure your signature block includes your website url and, where possible, include some of the keywords from your website in every post.

You should also look to acquire inbound links by joining umbrella groups such as a local Chamber of Commerce, industry associations and professional associations. These types of organisations often have websites with directories of members and their contact details so make sure your listing in these pages is up to date.

Finally, find other organisations with whom you have business relationships, such as suppliers, and arrange to swap links with each other’s website. Inbound links from organisations within the same industry grouping often carry more weight in page rank calculations than those from organisations which operate in unrelated market segments. Swapping links with another organisation can provide benefits to both organisations but make sure that the organisations with whom you do swap links are reputable businesses with a good reputation in both the local business area in which they operate and the wider internet and economy. Quality is better than quantity.

In all the cases above, if you have any input in to how the link to your website is described try to ensure that you include your most important keywords as part of that description.

Following the suggestions in the "Short Guide to Page Rank" is enough to prime the pump, but in the longer term there is only one way to build page rank and that is to create real quality content in your website. This is not an easy strategy, it requires dedication, focus, persistence, imagination and time.

Dedication because you have to ensure that all your website content is up to date. You have to continually add new meaningful content and expand the range of content on your website and make sure it is accessible to visitors (so your website’s architecture is very important).

Focus because there are many distractions when running your own organisation and many reasons why the organisation’s website may slip off the radar as an important business tool. You must maintain a focus on the importance of the website to the organisation’s overall business plan.

Persistence because this is not a “set and forget” approach. Search engines repeatedly revisit your website. Your approach to building content must be ongoing with a steady addition of new content, not just once but over the long term. For a small business you should maybe plan to add at least one new page every 3-4 months.

Imagination because every website is different. What works for a cafe will not work for an IT consultant. What works for a CD/DVD retailer will not work for a florist. What works for a bookshop will not work for an auto parts supplier.

Time because you are operating a long term strategic plan. Search engines need to be taught that your site is important and this is only something they will learn after repeated visits where they find that both content is growing and inbound links are increasing over time. This combination will build relevance for your website.

So the "Long Guide" is not so much that it is a long howto article but because it is an approach that must be applied consistently over a long period of time in order to be executed effectively.

Keywords are the words or phrases that users type into a search box to get search engine results. Obviously you want your site to be high up in the list when words or a phrase are entered that describe your business or your product(s). However competition is fierce, your competitors are wanting exactly the same result.

So how do beat the competition for your keywords? You need an optimization strategy that focuses on a particular keyword or phrase. If you sell a number of products you may have a large number of keywords or phrases (roughly 3 times as many keywords/phrases as you have products) so optimization requires a lot of work and is very time consuming.

Search engines expect that if you claim a keyword or phrase that is really what your site is about, so if you have multiple products the first thing you must consider is site structure and try to dedicate 1 page per product to act as a landing site for search results for that product's keywords/phrases. So if you try to use the keyword "garden centre" when you really specialise in australian natives you may find that the your search engine ranking may be quite low. The "garden centre" keyword may reasonably expect to be related to general garden centres with a wide range of plants including vegetables, indoor plants, pot plants, herbs etc. You would probably do much better with keywords such as "cacti", "succulents" , "aloe", "cactus" etc as these are directly related to the page subject matter.

The frequency with which a keyword or phrase appears on a page is a metric that search engine robots can easily determine so it's often used in search engine rules to determine page rank. Search engines also care whether the keywords appear in meta tags (site name, page description, keywords etc), alt tags (used with images) and lhyper link tags.

The most effective keywords and phrases are those which are naturally used by consumers as they search the internet. You may think you know how people search on the internet but rest assured that they will surprise you. For example you may think that if you sell barbecues you only need to consider terms such as "barbecue" and "bbq", but what about "b-b-q", "barbecue grills", "bbq grills" and even "barbecue girls"! Never forget the mis-typing as a valid keyword.

• Open Directory
• Yahoo Directory
• The simple way to submit a url to Google
• If you create an account with Google you may be able to use the excellent Google Webmaster Tools to get your website listed. Part of preparing to list your site in this way includes creating an xml sitemap. Some good online resources for creating xml sitemaps are xml-sitemaps.com, Google Sitemap Generator and SitemapDoc
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