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This guide covers all aspects of search engine positioning and optimization. It can be used as the basis for planning an online campaign that will have a significant effect on the visibility of a website.

Define your business
A successful search engine marketing campaign starts not with the engines, but with your own site and with the site’s users (i.e. your customers). There is not a lot of point attempting to seed the engines with links to your site unless you are clear about the services that you offer and who those services are aimed at.

Once you are clear about who your site is for and what it offers, you are in a position to start.

Set targets for your campaign

Estimate what each new visitor to the site might be worth to you.

Set a target for the number of new visitors you want to attract to the site.

These two estimates should set an upper limit on what your campaign should cost you.

Translate your business definitions into search phrases

Useful tools for helping you refine your list are Overture’s search suggestion tool, which is free, and Wordtracker, which for a modest charge offers detailed keyword analysis.

Make a list of key search words and phrases that reflect the main themes of your site.

Use the Overture search suggestion tool or Wordtracker to refine your list.

Structure your site around your search phrases

Sketch out a map of your site with sections and page titles that reflect your search phrases

Let this map be the basis for your site.

Create navigation that minimises the number of clicks between pages.

Add a site map for visitors to your site (including search engine spiders).

Register separate domains for separate businesses.

consider registering country-specific domains for the benefit of overseas users.

Design your pages to attract search engine traffic

Place your key search phrase in the title tag.

Use the description tag to provide a short summary of the page contents.

Use the keywords tag to reiterate the search phrase and to add variations.

Repeat the page title in a heading at the top of the page.

Repeat the page description in the first paragraph below the heading.

Write copy that echoes your page title, description and keywords.

Place the copy above any navigation links and other text.

Link text should use the title of the page being linked to.

Don’t use images for links to important content pages. If you do, add ALT tags.

Do not use frames.

Avoid excessive use of JavaScript; use a linked file, if necessary.

Use a linked Cascading Style Sheet.

If you already have a site, decide on whether to re-design the site all at once or gradually.

Be careful not to over-write or remove existing pages that already bring in traffic.

Submit your site to Directories and Search Engines

Review the title and description of your home page

Submit to the major directories using this title and description

Submit to the major search engines.

Create links to your new site from existing sites.

Consider setting up an account at Overture and at Google.

Research industry- and country-specific search engines.

Get your site linked from other sites

Research complementary sites that might be willing to link to pages on your

Request links from those sites.

Pay for links if it is cost effective to do so.

Monitor the results

Measure your ranking for different search phrases on different search engines.

Measure your site coverage on different search engines.

Check your logs to see which search engines are sending you traffic.

Check your logs to see how frequently your site is being spidered.

Re-submit pages when and if necessary.

When done correctly, search engine positioning can increase web traffic by a tremendous amount.Check your Search engine positioning on Yahoo, Google, All The Web. MSN and Hotbot. How does Search engine positioning tool work? Its simple, just enter your keyword/keyword phrase and your URL (Website Address www.yourdomain.com).

And the tool will shows number of pages indexed in Google and Yahoo, backlinks for the page and site fromYahoo, PageRank, Allinanchor, body keyword density and text link keyword density.