A lot of people ask me how to go about improving the search engine ranking and increasing their search engine traffic.
There are so many steps and processes that can be followed in order to improve search results for websites but here are my basic top 10 that all beginners and web designers should all know.
1) Domain Name
The most basic and probably one of the most obvious SEO tips is to have a domain relevant to you content. It is highly unlikely that you'll find information about worms on a site called www.interiordesign.com. So even before you start designing or building your site, make sure you have a good relevant domain name. Stringing all those keywords in to the domain name can help but you have to remember that it looks ridiculous sometimes. Especially when you see domains that are way too long and have way too many keywords in the URL, such as "www.adelaide-web-design-and-development.com".
A trick that some search engine optimizers use is relevant sub domains. For example, my blog, http://peter.pbwebdev.com.au would probably be better suited if it was called seo-web-development.pbwebdev.com.au, just to get some of those extra key words in to the URL of the site. On the other hand that sort of sub domain looks visually unappealing and doesn't appeal to my audience or myself.
So you'll have to balance a carefully chosen domain name to something practical.
2) Keyword Phrases (Key Search Phrases)
If you have already written all of the copy for you site, then go through it all and insert a few key search phrases that people would use to get to you site. It can sometimes take a lot of time and money researching exactly what your market would be searching for to find your site.
Put yourself in to the position of your target market your and try and figure out what they would type in to find your site. For some it is simple and pretty straight forward. A chocolate store would obviously aim at key word phrases such as "Chocolate Treats". If you were selling chocolates, then you probably would want to target the more particular search engine terms such as "Chocolate Gifts", or even "Valentines Day Gift Ideas". Phrases like that would really bring in targetted traffic you a chocolate store site.
So choose your key word phrases wisely. One word out and you could be missing out on so much traffic.
Tagging became popular with the growth of Web 2.0 sites over the last few years. You may see on some sites such as Technorati, Del.icio.us or Flickr having these tags implemented throughout their systems. 
If you're using a content management system such as Joomla or any other database CMS you might have a problem with non search engine friendly URLs.
So, you just had a web site made but no one is calling and you're not making any sales. If you had in your mind that all you to do was make a web site to start getting all of those leads and sales then you might need a little bit of re-education. You know that old quote from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it and he will come,” well it’s not quite the case. In fact it very much is the opposite when it comes to web sites.