As mentioned in the Link Building section, your site is going nowhere unless you get quality links to your site. At the same time, if your site is isn't optimized correctly, it'll be headed in the wrong direction. In this section we will go over all the things you can do to make your web site as search engine friendly as possible.

SITE & LINK STRUCTURE:

The structure of your site relates to the files and directories in your site, ideally you will have done this when building your site, if not it will be very beneficial if you implement the following style of structure for you site. I have named this section 'site and link structure' because they directly affect each other. The folders and filenames for your web pages make up the link structure of your site.

Let's say your site is about flowers again and your domain name is www.iloveflowers.com. The site is a general information site about the many types of flowers out there and we want seperate categories for each. In this case you would want a site and link structure similar to the following;

www.iloveflowers.com
www.iloveflowers.com/rose/roses.html
www.iloveflowers.com/daffodil/daffodils.html
www.iloveflowers.com/daisy/daisies.html
www.iloveflowers.com/violet/violets.html
www.iloveflowers.com/tulip/tulips.html

In this example we would have folders for each flower (rose, daffodil, daisy, violet and tulip). Then accordingly named web page files in each folder (roses, daffodils, daisies, violets and tulips). Setting up your site structure like this not only gives us the above example, it makes it natural for you to use your keywords in your site menu/navigation area. Other web configuration files like .css or javascript files can also be named using keywords.

Another important part of site structure is files that aren't web pages like images, documents, audio and video files etc. etc. You should also try and incorporate your keywords in them as they will also make up part of your link structure. Lets say we have a video about a rose show, it would be placed in the 'rose' folder with the name 'royal-roses-show-2009.mpg and it would give us the following URL;

www.iloveflowers.com/rose/royal-roses-show-2009.mpg

URL's play a very big role in how your site ranks within the search engines, so having your keywords present within them is a big advantage. Additionally, the search engines spiders that crawl your site basically do a better job if your link structure is organized and easy to follow.

The last thing I would include as part of your site structure is whether or not your site is standards compliant or W3C compliant. Having a site that is standards compliant means all its code uses valid structure, there are no broken links or missing files and so on. You can visit www.w3.org to learn more about web standards and run some tests on your site. Having a compliant site doesn't necessarily mean you will rank better, there are millions of sites ranking just fine that aren't valid. Still though, if you want a site that's error free you should look in to it.

CONTENT:

The content within your site relates to the actual text that can be read on your site although any text that is, or is in an image can not be read by search engine spiders. Your keywords should be present within the content and you should optimize each page according to its keywords with the homepage showcasing all or most of them, at the very least your main 3 - 5 approx.

Each page within your site has the potential to gain rankings and that's why you should optimize them all according to their relevant keywords, just as important you need to build links to all optimized pages in your site.

Placing your keywords in bold and tags places more importance on those words assisting the search engines rank your site accordingly. The same can be said for using keywords within the link text (anchor text) on your own pages and within your site's navigation menus.

PAGE TITLE:
Always ensure your page titles are written in a natural manner and don't use the same page title for every page in your site. Write unique page titles for each page that reflects the content or subject of that page. Considering the page title is a strong element search engines look at, you want to ensure your keywords are in them. Dont spam the page title out as search engines are smarter than that.