Although Search Engine Optimisation is extremely important when it comes to website design, it cannot guarantee a high ranking position from search engine results. However if a site has a low ranking, all is not lost. Please navigate through the information to your left to find out a bit more about web marketing.

Content
There's no two ways about it. The larger the website in terms of content, the higher the search engine ranking will be. If you already have a website it should not be left static. Continually update sites with any new information you can provide customers about your products/services. Be as detailed as possible with as many pages as possible, where applicable.

Reciprocal Links
Most of the large search engines cross reference links you may have in your website to other websites. This must be a two way process, i.e. a link to a site from your website must be matched with a link to your site from the other. The more reciprocal links your site contains the better. Example sites could be; Suppliers, Customers, Trade bodies etc.

Page Title
Each web page should have a distinct title that reflects the content of the page. Try to keep it short and precise. Some users like to keep the website name at the start of the title and then follow with a page description. There are no hard and fast rules apart from that each page title must be unique.

File Naming/Image Naming
Try to name all images and web pages with relevantly as these are also used by search engines.

Meta Tags/ Keywords
Hidden behind the scenes of a web page in the code are descriptive tags called metatags. These tags contain "Page Descriptions" and "Keywords". These are entered by the web designer and are used by search engines to reference pages. Keywords are often incorrectly entered. They should be words that appear in the text rather than a list of words that the designer would like the page to be referenced by. As search engines have become more sophisticated they are able to identify meta tags that incorrectly describe a page, and thus give these pages a low ranking. The key is to keep descriptions and keywords succinct and to the point.

Javascript
Javascript is a language that is used on many websites to add functionality that is not available in the the standard html language. It is often used to create visually more pleasing menus and image based links. Search engines cannot read this code, and thus any links to other pages from such links will not be followed by the search engines robots, and thus these pages are hidden. If Javascript is used, designers should also provide another html version of the site navigation on each page to aid the robots through the site.

Sitemaps
Always provide a sitemap on each page of your website. This is a page that lists all of the pages that are available on your website. Search engines can use this to understand your site better and hopefully find page that cannot be reached by using the links on your pages. (Search engines cannot read Macromedia Flash websites or Javascript derived links)

Google Sitemaps
Most e-commerce solutions use a back-end database to store all of the product details. When the user comes to look at the products they are pulling them directly from the database using a dynamic webpage. Dynamic webpages are hard for search engines to read and thus Google have provided a solution where the content of a product database can be uploaded as a sitemap to Google. This greatly increases the chance of an increase in your page ranking. i.e. if you add a new online store to your website with 300 products, you are in effect are adding 300 new pages to your site. Without submitting a full sitemap Google may only read your dynamic products page as 1 new page.