The thought of optimizing web pages for search engines is one task which strikes fear into the hearts of most webmasters. The fear stems from the knowledge that once you have submitted your pages to the search engines you have passed the point of no return. When you click the submit button there is no undoing what you have done.
As a webmaster search engine optimization is something you can do yourself, you don't really need to pay hundreds of dollars to the experts to have your pages optimized, but you do need to be careful to get it 'Right The First Time'
Optimizing should start even before you begin writing your pages. You should know which services or products you are going to market on the net and you should also have a list of relevant keywords for your service or product. Your next step should be to go to Net Wealth Group and check your keywords with the Overture keyword suggestion tool:
http://www.netwealthgroup.com/se-promotion.htm
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If you have had a look at the Overture keyword tool you will see what I mean. It's pointless optimizing your pages for a word which has been searched for 25 times during the last month when you can possibly come up with a similar keyword which has been searched for thousands of times.
Next if you are lucky enough to be able to include your keyword in your domain name, thats great. If not, you should include your keyword or search term in your title tag eg: <TITLE>keyword here</TITLE>. The next place to include your keyword search term is in your heading and 2 to 3 times in your first paragraph.
Don't repeat your keywords too many times or once again the search engines will see this as spam. Search engines are looking for good relevant content, not garbled keyword enriched spam.
You should also check that all of your links are working. Broken links stop search engine spiders from properly indexing your web site, not to mention they are downright frustrating to users, causing them to leave your site.
Never ever try to trick the search engines - they know all the tricks and when you're caught, you will be penalized, search engines can permanently remove your site from their database. I personally am not interested in doorway pages, redirects, keyword spam, invisible text and multiple domains that host the same web pages.
Make sure you put some effort into building links, getting other relevant websites to link to your web site. Google especially places significant importance on incoming links to your site, the more incoming links you have the better chance you have of increasing your PR 'page ranking'
If you follow what I have said above you will find you will go a long way towards getting a good ranking with the search engines. Not really too scary is it?