Good morning
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be invited to a SEO conference. I found it extremely useful and thought I'd share with you some of the most prevalent ideas. Keywords are number one for search criteria, it’s deciding what words you want to associate your site with. The more common the word/phrase the more work you’ll need to do on SEO. Around these words you then build your site. All sounds pretty simple, and it is when you know how. Obviously SEOs make their money by knowing how to write your site so your keywords result in top search results. Key things to take from this post;

• Focus on the keywords you want to associate with, research them.
• Analyse your site before you begin optimisation
• Start the optimisation process
• Invest in back links from sites which have similar content to your own
• Ensure all your pages are being indexed
• The magic number for the ‘keywords’ appearing in page title and page description is 3 each
• Content is the more important thing, more relevant content, higher you are
• Monitor your performance on search engines

Cheers
Ryan Partington

External Links: Merseyside ICT, Merit, JanKiln and Associates, Jan's Blog with optimisation tips

SEO Tools: http://www.feedburner.com - RSS Feed optimisation

http://www.se-spider.com/ - Ensure your links are being crawled

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ - Check how many back links

http://ranks.nl/ - Compare search engines results

http://www.linkpopularity.com/ - Google/MSN/Yahoo - Search engine specific back links