If your site is struggling to reach its traffic potential, then you’re not alone. With millions of websites currently in existence, the fight for traffic has never been fiercer, especially since the commercialization of the internet over the last few years. The days of personal hobby sites that served more as an outlet for communication with the outside world, rather than a commercial venture have long since gone. Today, the internet is driven by business, and profit.

Once serious money is involved the stakes are that much greater, and you’re ability to capture an audience becomes that much harder. There are a whole host of reasons why websites fail. Primary among those reasons is lack of solid content. Put simply you can have the best designed website on the planet, but if it isn’t updated with strong content or innovative new products, then your site is doomed to be a short lived postcard and nothing more.

But say your site has plenty of content, much of it original, unique and interesting, then your next most pressing issue is to consider its audience and methods of optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a priority when designing, coding and launching your website. Throughout Peak SEO, you’ll find all manner of advice on optimization, from basic code tweaks, through to rather advanced methods involving the study of keywords, mistypes, pay per click advertising etc.

If you’re new to the world of SEO, then there are three absolute must-do’s at the outset.

Generally speaking, your site will eventually be indexed, regardless of content or topic, the most minimalist of sites get indexed, even a single page, but in order to get maximum benefit from indexation you need to do the leg work.

Obviously submission with the big three, Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search are paramount. It’s difficult to predict how long it takes from the time of submission to indexation on any of the search engines, it varies considerably, but it’s a good idea to submit your site at least a week and some people suggest, a month, before launch day.

Here are the URL’s for submission on the big three:

There are a number of commercial programs you can use, with a vast range of options for search engine submission. However, many SEO professionals advise that manual submission is the best method, and that you should take some care and attention to detail when submitting your new site.

One of the primary reasons for this is that manual submission prompts the webmaster to optimize that submission for that specific search engine, but more importantly many automated, scripted, submission services are often flagged by the search engines which have strict rules governing how sites are submitted. Being flagged can sometimes lead to a lengthy blacklisting.

An often overlooked feature by many webmasters, the sitemap is actually quite vital to good SEO practice. Due to the technical limitations of search engine spiders, often referred to as robots, many sites are poorly or only partially indexed.

If your site is designed with multiple levels of hierarchy and the pages within the site are poorly interlinked, than this problem is quite likely to occur, as some spiders will only dig three or four levels into your site.

Google, has recently taken the initiative to help address this problem with the launch of Google Sitemaps, which is a dynamic method of linking your sites content to the backbone of Google. It’s a win-win solution. Google, gets to index your fresh content faster than it would have otherwise, and fulfill its never ending search for relevant, quality content, encouraging greater use of the engine, and greater profits, and you get the benefit of more listings and more traffic as a result. Everyone’s happy.

There are plenty of scripts to help you create a sitemap, any many of today’s modern CMS software solutions either have the ability to generate sitemaps built-in, or as an add-on product. Whatever you choose, the creation of a sitemap on your site is a vital step forward.

Without delving too much into the ins and outs of best practice in SEO oriented design, there are some essential basics that every website should implement, and probably the most important of those from a design point of view are:

Page Title: Make sure the page title reflects the content accurately. Very important!

Page Description: A snappy, well written description will draw an eagle eye on the search engine listing pages. The more accurate and targeted that description is, the more likely a page is to get visited.

Keyword Density: Highlight the keyword/s in your content and make sure that keyword appears at least twice. If you really want to have the best results, you need to examine the content of meta tags, heading tags, alt tags etc to make sure your keyword appears within those as well.

As this is just an introductory piece, ill cut it short there. If your new to SEO and don’t understand all the terms used in the above text, check out the glossary service, or simply mouse-over those terms.

For a more thorough understanding of general search engine optimization, continue on to other articles in this category.