I don’t claim to be the font of knowledge for search engine optimisation but these tips might give people entirely new to the concept a bit of a push in the right direction.

My biggest personal issue with some SEO is that it throws visitor and user experience out the window. Yuck. If you can’t see the benefit for real people when you do something for your website, then I’d suggest steering well clear of doing whatever it is.

1. Where possible and practical, keywords in your domain/URL help:
   If you haven’t yet secured your domain name, then have a think about what your site will be about and make sure that’s obvious in the name. For example the content of bobs-place.com isn’t going to be as obvious to users as paintinghouses.com. Sure Bob might paint houses, and he might be good, but people are not going to be searching for ‘bob’ when looking for a painter unless they already know of his business.

2. Title tags > meta tags:
   Basically everything is more important than the old meta keyword tags, but they do have their use. The HTML title tag isn’t a meta tag, but it’s so often discussed in association with them, that it’s worth including here.  A good title which describes the specific page it’s about. A lot of websites might just go for the generic <title> My Site </title> across all the pages. Instead, try and go for something like “My Site: Book Reviews” for the book review page. It makes it a lot more obvious what that page is about, right? So do it. Obvious is good.

3. JavaScript is good fun, but not everyone can see it:
   Search engine spiders as a general rule will not be able to access components of your site that rely on JavaScript. Some users (yes, real people) also might opt not to enable JS. It’s courteous to make sure your site is still accessible and useable to these people. If you’re developing a site for a private audience this might not be such a problem, but when you want as many people to find and use it as possible, then make sure they can use it.

4. ?id=1908918
   Does that make sense to you? Do you know what the page refers to or is about? No, neither do I. Perhaps this should have come under point #1, but it’s such a huge problem for many websites at the moment, that I feel it deserves it’s own section. Dynamic websites are great, but at least make the URLs/URIs on the site slightly less intimidating. People are hardly going to write down the address to refer to later if it’s filled with code. Try using some .htaccess mod_rewrite handles to make it all pretty and nice, so you, search engines and visitors can all get along and play nicely. Check out this article for some great tips on setting it up.

5. Original content is good. Original content is good.
   I’m not just repeating myself for the sake of emphasis, it’s partly to introduce another no-no. While good, original content is king, duplicate content is not. This piece of advice is more to prevent search engine penalisation. Having verbatim copies of pages (whether your own sites or of other people’s) is not a good idea. It indicates that you don’t have anything original or useful to say, and you don’t want to portray that.

There are heaps of other things you can do to ensure your users enjoy their visit, and to curry favour with search engines. These ideas are purely a start, but if you follow them then you are doing at least something right.