A popular question, is just what is SEO? SEO is search engine optimisation, which can have you dominate Google and bring in lots of visitors to your website.
Let’s assume you don’t even have a website, let alone domain yet. Your domain name should be easy to remember and short and snappy. Try to avoid putting hyphens in if you can avoid it. It is highly recommended if possible to have keywords in your domain.
Once a domain is secured, it’s time to sort your website. Your website and its structure will largely depend on what it is being used for. Google and other search engines are currently ranking things like blogs quite highly. However this, like many things, won’t last forever, and you need to plan for the long term. Google likes blogs because of the constant change in fresh content. If you’re going to be using a CMS (content management system) do your research into how easy they can be made SEO friendly. If you want a recommendation, you won’t go far wrong with WordPress.
Be aware of using meta tags as they certainly don’t have the kind of effect on SEO they used to. If you do employ meta keyphrases, make sure the words appear on the page they are listed on. Also put a meta description which should be written for human eyes as this is the text that Google displays as the extract from the site.
Internal linking structure needs to be intelligent and guide people seemlessly through your website. If your primary navigation does not include links to every “key” page you should add some secondary navigation to the page footer. Be wary of using Flash- and if you do, ensure hard links are present to compensate. On the flip side there may also be content that you don’t want to be indexed and for this you can place a text file on your side called robots.txt. In it you can then use the following to help keep the spiders out.
User-agent: * Disallow: /
This tells spiders not to list certain pages, folders and documents.
These are some of the basic, but important parts of SEO- good luck!