6: Optimise

As I've mentioned, search engine optimisation should actually be an integral part of your site design, that will save a lot of headaches afterwards. However, I will dedicate a separate section to SEO.

Optimising is actually pretty easy, if you know what you're doing. Don't go out and buy Webposition Gold or any of those other services that guarantee you top placement. It's a waste of money, and if you do it properly you will get the same (or even better) results.
A free tool that I like very much and use extensively is the online Meta Tag Analyzer Tool from Widexl. By checking your page with it, you can easily and quickly optimise it. It lists all the keywords found on your page, making it very easy to make your keywords relevant to the page.

Lets start off with the basic tags every well-optimised page should have. These are the ones I use: (I have replaced the square brackets by "{" and "}", or blogger won't display them)

{TITLE}Put your title here{/TITLE}
{META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="separate, by, commas"}
{META NAME="Description" CONTENT="description goes here"}
{META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="ALL,Index,Follow"}
{META NAME="Distribution" CONTENT="Global"}
{META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="30 Days"}
{META NAME="Rating" CONTENT="Mature"}
{META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="True"}

The Title tag: Make sure that it fits the content of your site. Use keywords from your site's content. If you have the title from the actual page in your title tag, you're almost assured of 100% relevancy.

The Keyword tag: Don't put in keywords that aren't actually on your page. Sounds simple, but many people think that by putting "free porn" or "Paris Hilton"in their keywords they'll get more hits. They might, but only if there is actually free porn or pics of Paris Hilton on the site :)

The Description tag: Another no-brainer, really. If you have a line of text on your page describing the content, and you put it in the description tag, you should get 100% relevancy.

I don't feel like explaining what the other tags do right now, just put them in :)