By making your website as search engine friendly as possible you stand a far greater chance of climbing up the ranking results ladder, thus winning more traffic and increasing sales and enquires. Around 80% of your new visitor traffic will come from search engines, if your site performs badly in these search engines the consequences to visitor numbers can be severe.

Many optimisation companies will present search engine optimisation as some mystical black art that requires Zen like mastery and a huge sacrifice, usually money!

However, it isn't that complicated, search engines want to present their users with information pertinent to the search term entered by that user. The best way to attract search engine traffic is by having lots of relevant information relating to what the searcher is looking for.

So, it turns out the 1st golden rule of your website is "content"

The more content your website has on a subject the more "search terms" will be contained within that textual content. If you sell widgets, and you have 100 pages dedicated to information about widgets as opposed to a site that sells widgets but only has 1 page of information your website will vastly out perform the other in the search engines. In a simple form this works because it is much more likely that the searcher entered a term such as "cheap blue widgets" and with 100 pages of content is much more likely that these terms will appear in your website as opposed to a site with one page, and as such you will be ranked higher in the Google rankings. If you then apply this to the potential 1000's of possible search terms that could be used to find widgets, "Used Widgets, Widgets in Yorkshire, New condensed purple shelled widgets, etc etc" In all likelihood your website with its 100 pages of content about widgets is much more likely to contain these terms, and so get presented well in the rankings.

The second golden rule is making sure that all that wonderful content is available to search engines to browse.

Many websites employ complex navigation systems, such as JavaScript or flash driven drop down navigations, these look wonderful but unless deployed with a secondary HTML driven navigation Google never finds these pages and pages of content and so treats your website like the 1 page website.

The 3rd rule is poorly formatted HTML and page structure.

Most search engines grade the quality of the page you present, lots of broken links and images will score your site badly. Most search engines treat the text nearer the top of the page as having more relevance that information at the bottom of a page, so ideally the page structure needs to have the textual content about your website closer to the top, and any styling and control code lower down the page.

The 4th rule is strong external links.

If another website has a link to your website, search engines tend to treat this as a vote in favour of your website, the more links you have incoming the more votes your website has for it. A lesser known fact is that the websites you link to also effect this voting. If you have lots of links that the search engine think link to quality websites you will gain points, if you have lots of links to websites the search engines think are poor, or breaking their guidelines, your website will be penalised accordingly. So you have to think about who links to you and who you link to.