Two SEO Top Tips: Making your website rank higher in the search engines

Sometimes finding decent advice about how to rank higher in search engines is like being on an endless treasure hunt: websites contradict each other, suggest different things... I hope the below items help you in some way!
1) Identify your keywords:
When users type their search requirements into a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo!), they will tend not too specific at first - this is mostly because they do not know what they are after.
For example, if they live in London and are looking for Search Engine Optimisation help then they might enter:
London SEO - which results in nearly 14,000,000 possible websites
The first result I found when I searched this search criteria did not seem particularly relevent - not very helpful!
Making search criteria more specific helps bring down the number of results and filters out anything that that might be irrelevent. The user has decided that they would like the services of a search engine optimisation 'company' in London:
London SEO company - which now results in roughly 700,00
The use of the place 'London' ensures search engines make there results much more localised in comparisson to the whole world!
Given the problems with users and searches described above - to make sure you get people visiting your website you need to carefully analyse exactly what your website does, for, promoting and/or services it provides to discover your keywords.
This activity could actually be a very good Team building exercise. Say your company sell vending machines, get a group together and start off with the main theme. In this case it is obvious: a "Vending machine" - remember, don't forget the plural: "Vending machines" next you could state you are company status like so: "Vending machine company". This stems off into an endless wealth of different variations ("Vending operator" or "vending consumables")...
2) Page Layout/Formatting and Navigation:
This section is really all about where you have information on the page, what is looks like and how easy it is to find.
Page layout it a very complicated process. You want to show information in a pleasing way and often what we think is pleasing is the complete opposite for others. What I would suggest is the K.I.S.S strategy of: "Keep it Simple Stupid". Keep the navigation separate, do not have annoying pop-ups that interupt a users' experience of your website and stay away from putting too much text of the screen - chance are that it will not be read in that state - try and simplify it if at all possible.
Titles, Headings, Bullets, Tables are also affected by page layout and where they appear on the page is very important in terms of how much weight they are given by the search engine.
Formatting is how you have highlighted different sections such as whether text is bold/italic/coloured/combinations/fonts... what colours are in place in tables with what boarders and cell sizes.
Navigation is how easy is it to reach all pages of your site. A search engine will measure this from your homepage and a standard rule is that all pages should be accessible within 3 clicks. Another problem that programmers fall into is that they use JavaScript menus. These are invisible to a search engine. If you are insistant on using these then please ensure that you include a smaller, standard HTML text version at the bottom of the screen. The reason for this is that you may have used many of your keywords within your menu structure and this would be pointless unless search engines can see this...
I hoped that clarified these two main sections of Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation.




