Search Engine Optimization, SEO for short is actually really easy when you get the hang of it, all it takes is a bit of practice and work and your website will be up and ready to go SEO wise.

One of the most important things for SEO purposes is your top level domain or TLD. This is the extension on the end of your website such as .com, .net, .us, or .info. Those TLD are important because for some reason it takes a lot more work to get lesser known TLD in the rankings of search sites like Google. It is possible, but the success rate is much higher for .com, .net, and .org URLs.

Basic Design Tricks
Some of the best things you can do are centered around the design of your website. This includes using a CSS stylesheet instead of (old) HTML color and size tags. This will help clean up your website code and make it easier to index the content. ANother thing you can do is make sure that your navigation uses text links instead of image and javascript links. Doing this helps because it makes the navigation of the site easier to follow for the search bot, making all your pages indexable, instead of just the easiest ones to get to.

Do not use a splash page on your website (unless it is under construction). The splash page never has as much content as a good homepage does, so make sure you get rid of that splash page, yesterday (now).

Content Tricks
I wouldn’t really call this a trick, but write really good content. Pretty simple, right? Well, not always. Writing good content for SEO purposes can be really difficult, but once you learn how to write in a great style as an overall writer, learning to write for SEO is very easy. Basically search engines love keywords, they are what people are searching for. So for example if I have a website that is about “chocolate covered pancakes” that is what I want someone to type in to Google when they are searching. So I will make sure my website domain has chocolate covered pancakes in it, my title does, and most of all, my content. I will have sentences that contain those keywords that I want my site to rank for. So I will write about things like “chocolate pancake recipes” and other phrases like that to help my ranking within the search engines.