Hence, companies will spend thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pounds per year on consultancy fees or inhouse expertise to keep their website on top of the pile.

They’re willing to spend these vast sums because SEO can sound like a dark art, and there are plenty of people out there happy enough to have it that way, and take your money for their esoteric knowledge. But, in reality, it’s not that difficult and getting the basics right can be blindingly obvious.

It’s called optimising because it’s a balance of engineering a website so that Google, Yahoo! and the like can understand how best to index it, without affecting its usability for real people. And the truth is that at least at the most basic of levels, with a little guidance even the most computer-illiterate person can have a stab at getting on the Google front page.

1 Getting started

You should start with a clear idea of what your user is going to do on your website. Are they visiting because they want to buy something from you right there and then? Are you showcasing a particular speciality of your business? Are they there just to find a contact number so they can call you?

Each different type of user will take a different journey and you should structure your site around getting them through to their goal as efficiently as possible.  And to achieve this you need a logical structure reflected in a clear navigation.

Taking this to the extreme, if you are a commercial printer introducing a web-to-print service, you might in fact want to look at launching a completely new site dedicated to your new venture. This means that rather than trying to cater for two different audiences looking for different outcomes in a single site, you can divide the two and maximise the SEO capability.

But remember even within this separate website there will be multiple audiences. So, for your web-to-print shop, there will be users who land on your homepage and are immediately interested in a special offer you have there, but there will be a bunch of them who don’t and need guidance to find the product range that suits their needs.

Therefore, good navigation with a clear hierarchical classification of categories and sub-categories that enables your user to navigate across the different regions of your site is a must and thinking about those user journeys should govern that process.

2 Word perfect

A sensible, logical site structure means that you can create really well-targeted category pages that carry a good density of relevant keywords. Keywords are the text on pages which you want to appear at the top of a results page when someone searches those terms on a search engine. Optimising these lower-level category pages, you can be really quite specific, lowering the competition, and therefore the bar to getting on to page one, while at the same time being confident that the traffic that search engines deliver to that page will be highly targeted. So if you want to be the top ranking letterpress printer in Bromsgrove, then you need to ensure your page carries terms that users looking for letterpress in Bromsgrove would search for.

How do you know what those keywords are? Well, in this instance, "Bromsgrove" and "letterpress" are fairly obvious, but if you’re stuck for ideas then there are plenty of free tools out on the web to give you a few prompts, not least of which is Google’s Keyword tool. 

The pages themselves need to be optimised too, both in terms of the content and HTML structure and properties. Search engines pay a great deal of heed to hierarchies in web pages. So page title and page description are the most important elements in how search engines understand how to index a page, and the text should be relevant to the content as well. Use them sensibly – the page title for example is a 68-character text string – there’s no point in pasting War and Peace here.

The content visible to your reader is equally important for SEO. You should use meta data, such as <H> tags for headlines and titles, to show search engines that these elements are more important than the paragraph text that follows, while ensuring the text includes those keywords.

However, be careful not to overdo things. Bear in mind that ultimately it’s people you want on your site, more than search engines, so your copy should remain engaging – avoid keyword ‘stuffing’.

The URLs for each page can also be optimised, so myprint.com/wideformat/banners/vinyl&productid= 123456 is light years better than myprint.com/id=654321.

3 Points of difference

If you’re selling products online, you might have lots of very similar pages with only small changes – business cards on different stocks, or photobooks with a variety of similar templates. To a search engine, this might look like a lot of pages of duplicate content and you’ll likely get penalised for it.

One way round this is to use canonical URLs, as above, which is to standardise your URLs on a format so that a search engine can ignore variations as they all refer to the ‘master’ URL.

There is plenty you can do outside your site to make it look like it’s worth visiting to search engines.

For a start, you can make sure your site is on them by registering with them. Google and Yahoo may be the first port of call, but in some countries different search engines rule – Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia. And you’ll want to register your site with directories such as Dmoz.

And f you can get other relevant sites to link to yours it will raise your profile with search engines and may help you rank higher up search results. However, you should avoid ‘link exchanges’. Search engines are pretty wise to recipricol links.

Of course, over time, you will accrue plenty of links, so it’s worth looking up a backlink checker – again there are plenty of free backlink tools on the web – to see who’s linking to you.

Finally, you’ll need to track your traffic to see how well it’s measuring up to those KPIs you set out at the beginning. Google has a system called PageRank that is an indication of the overall importance of your site in the wider ‘webosphere’, but much more useful is the free Google Analytics service to analyse traffic. It’s pretty straightforward to sign up for an account and all you need to do is add a small piece of code to your web pages.

It’s essential to continually review your progress. Perhaps your registration form is too complicated. Perhaps you’ve placed your shopping basket where no one can find it. You’ll never know unless you track what users do on the site, how they got there, how often they visit, how long they spend on it, how much they look at, where they leave it and when, if ever, they come back.