This one-time activity will transform your website from whatever it is presently to a search engine optimised version that is much more attractive to search engines. This is extremely important in getting your website ranked as high as possible on the search engine results. The things that are appealing to a search engine are not the same as those things that are aesthetically pleasing on a website. In many cases such fancy programming on a site is a negative for search engines.

Analyse What You Have

First you will need to begin by analyzing your current site, so look at these things:

The look and feel of the site

Is the site optimized for visitors?

Is the site optimized for search engines?

Does the site work for multiple browsers?

Critical Components of a Good Website

In most cases, websites are lacking in some of these areas. In order to make your website appealing to human visitors and search engines, and be effective in its purposes, you will need to go through and make sure the following things are in place. If they are not, you need to include them for the best results possible.

Easy navigation: Make sure the site is easy to use and straightforward.

Most important info "above the fold": Make sure all the important information is visible when a visitor first arrives at the home page. A good number of people will not scroll down to find the important information.

All links working: Don't frustrate visitors or the search engines with broken links.

Home Page, Products Page, Service Page, Testimonials, About, and Contact Form.

Lead visitors through the site: Make sure you are taking visitors exactly where you want them to go on your site.

Specific instructions. Multiple calls to action: Call now, buy now, etc.

Pictures used correctly: This includes proper sizing of pictures as well as using captions to explain what the pictures represent.

Non-distracting design: This goes for a background that is too distracting as well as crazy fonts, italics and underlines.

Centered layout that has dark text on a light background.

Multiple ways to contact with the phone number on the top right, side and bottom, and the address only at the bottom.

Trust factors like BBB and awards clearly on the front page.

Testimonials on the front page.

Personal branding: This includes pictures of you and your staff, branded vehicles, audio and video messages, and links to any social networking site like Facebook or Twitter.

Optimization for keywords: Using good keywords is huge for search engines and you must take some time to do keyword research before you can determine if keywords are optimized properly.

Relevancy: Search engines love websites that show relevancy. This is done by starting broad and then drilling down in themes. Always optimize for one keyword per page instead of multiple keywords per page.

Make sure that your keywords are in your title tags, meta tags, the URL, the headers and description of a web page.

Good content: Ensure that all text on your website is search engine optimized with strategic use of keywords and avoid duplicate content.

Avoid Flash and frames.

With the onsite SEO updates completed, your website should naturally move closer to the top of search engine results. However, you cannot rely on this alone. You must also continue with your online marketing plan and maintain a blog, do other Web 2.0 applications and submit articles with links back to your website in order to increase traffic and quality one-way links that will help you get to the very top of the results like you want and need.