Optimising your website for the search engines needn't be expensive for business owners. Many small or micro businesses simply don't have the resources to pay for their own marketing department and find they need to conduct their own marketing.

Search engine optimisation is very simple despite it appearing otherwise, and is a task any business owner can complete for themselves and achieve results; all it requires is dedication and time:

Firstly decide what search words people will be keying into a search engine to find you. A free trial at www.wordtracker.com can provide you with this information.

It may not be the best idea to pick the most popular words, because whilst you will have many search engine users keying in these keywords or phrases - you also will have plenty of competitors, making it harder for you to reach the surface of the search engines.

You may want to aim at the second or third most popular terms, or try and be very specific with your keywords, and make a niche for yourself.

Search Engine Optimisation Work Tasks

These will unfortunately need to be completed on a weekly/monthly basis, as search engine optimisation is an ongoing process. No sooner have you reached the top of the search engines you could easily slip down them again as your competitors double their efforts to pull ahead of you; this forces you to continue your optimisation work for the long term to stay ahead of the game.

1. Link Building

You need to build a good number (as many as possible) of incoming links to your site; create a links page for your site and build reciprocal (swapped) links with other companies in the same or similar line of business.

When you ask for links from other people you should ask that they use a link title that contains your keywords (but makes sense still), and then link this text to your website address.

The best links are from similar companies who have a good ranking themselves, and whose link will feature any of your keywords.

This is a key factor in ranking - the number of links you have to your site - the top ranked sites have thousands of links to them. You will find people who want to swap here www.linkpartners.com - which is just an easy way of finding willing partners.

2. Content Is King

Build good quality content on your website, the content should be useful and keyword rich without being excessively repetitive - some search engines view excessive keyword littering as spam and actually can count this against you and perhaps even ban you from their search engine.

Others methods that can cause you to be banned are to litter keywords on your site and then hide them so that they are not visible. Frequently update and add to your content, as refreshing content also improves your importance in the opinion of the search engines.

3. Site Composition

Ensure that even if your site is flash based, or entirely image based, that there are plenty of textual links to navigate the entire site with, this will make it easier for the indexing robots (from the search engines) to find your pages and your keyword rich content.

Create alt tags on images to name them, if relevant use keywords in the image names.

Make sure the right keywords are used on your meta tags, page descriptions and page titles, do not use a string of keywords for your page titles or descriptions, some search engines don't like this and view it as spam/cheating. Each page should have titles, descriptions, and keywords relevant to the information on the page.

Use keywords in your page headers.

4. Submission

You can use www.submitexpress.com to submit your website to multiple search engines for free at once.

Submit your site to www.dmoz.org - Google rates this highly and a listing will greatly boost your ranking.

5. Patience

Expect it to take time (up to three months even) to achieve a good ranking from all of your efforts, and have patience.