Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be an extremely intricate and involved process; in fact, it is better to think of SEO as a complex set of processes. A quick glance at well-respected publications on the topic will tell you that link building is the bread and butter of any search engine optimisation campaign, so you would be forgiven for assuming that this is the best place to start - but you would also be wrong.
Before you start considering off-page SEO, it is important to begin with your web site itself. Many industry professionals will spend a maximum of 20% of their resources on on-page SEO, with the remaining 80% to be spent on off-page promotion and link building; however, there is a useful analogy to keep in mind when designing an SEO campaign. Just as you would not build a house without foundations, you should not build an SEO campaign without on-page optimisation. The fact that foundations comprise of only a small part of a finished structure is less important than the fact that the structure cannot support itself without them.
Despite the increasing sophistication of search engine algorithms, these are essentially mathematical processes, and for the foreseeable future at least they are not capable of deriving meaning from content in the same way that human beings are. In other words, search engines can only understand what they are programmed to understand - so to make sure your web site ranks well in search engine results, you will want to arrange your web site (and its contents) in such a way that search engines are able to understand it.
There are several ways you can ensure your web site is unlikely to confuse search engines. First and foremost, you should make sure that all the pages on your web site are connected. Search engine crawlers must be able to find a page in order to index it, and they do this by following links. By making sure that your home page links to its sub pages and vice versa, you will reduce the chances of content being missed by search engine crawlers.
Whilst there are too many techniques to list in the body of this article, here are a few more to get you designing your site along the right lines:
1. Make sure that you do not duplicate content within your site. Search engine algorithms do not like duplicate content as it tends to make a web site appear 'spammy'
2. If your web site includes images, it is a good idea to name these in a descriptive way, e.g. "yellow-flowers.jpg" for a picture of yellow flowers.
3. Unless it is completely impractical to do so, try to ensure that you use descriptive URLs for your web pages too, e.g. "./delicious-cheese-selections.php" for a page about cheeseboards.