Optimizing your website for the search engines (in order to get a good ranking for specific search words) needn't be expensive for business owners. Many small or micro businesses simply don't have the resources to pay for their own marketing department or search engine experts and find they need to conduct their own optimization, at least at startup stage anyway.

Search engine optimization is very simple despite it appearing otherwise, and is a task any business owner can complete for themselves and achieve results; all it requires is dedication and time:Firstly decide what search words people will be keying into a search engine to find you. A free trial at www.wordtracker.com can provide you with this information.It may not be the best idea to pick the most popular words, because whilst you will have many search engine users keying in these keywords or phrases - you also will have plenty of competitors, making it harder for you to reach the surface of the search engines.You may want to aim at the second or third most popular terms, or try and be very specific with your keywords, and make a niche for yourself.    

These will unfortunately need to be completed on a weekly/monthly basis, as search engine optimisation is an ongoing process. No sooner have you reached the top of the search engines you could easily slip down them again as your competitors double their efforts to pull ahead of you; this forces you to continue your optimisation work for the long term to stay ahead of the game.

1. Link Building
It used be that trading links was effective. Since recently Google, by far the most used search engine, has change this rule due to many people doing this exact thing. You can still do it but when you have "reciprical links", Google by default nullifies this (ie. you do not get any extra points in ranking at all). Now, the thing to do is have other websites link to you, and that's all. The best links are from similar companies who have a good ranking themselves, and whose link will feature any of your keywords.This is a key factor in ranking - the number of links you have to your site - the top ranked sites have thousands of links to them. How do you get people to link to your site? Unique original content, of course (see below). You can also build in bound only links by writing industry expert articles and submitting them to article directories or resources. These always allow a 'author bio' within which you can place your url.Another good way to gain inbound only links is to submit your site to some of the many high quality free business directories on the Internet. 

2. Content Is King

Build good quality content on your website, the content should be useful and keyword rich without being excessively keyword repetitive - some search engines view excessive keyword littering as spam and actually can count this against you and perhaps even ban you from their search engine.

It is said that keyword density of about 1-5% per page is a good benchmark to aim for (so about 1-5% of the page words can contain your repeating keyword/s)

Others methods that can cause you to be banned are to litter keywords on your site and then hide them so that they are not visible. Frequently update and add to your content, as refreshing content also improves your importance in the opinion of the search engines.

Having a blog on your website is a very good way of regularly adding keyword rich content and serves the dual purpose of helping you connect with your customer base and evidence expertise in your field.

3. Site Composition

Ensure that even if your site is flash based, or entirely image based, that there are also text only links to navigate the entire site with, this will enable the indexing robots (from the search engines) to find your pages and your keyword rich content.

It's important that your site content is not buried in flash files, or isn't in image format; the search engine robots would be unable to read it in this case.

Search engine robots cannot navigate image based links, only .html links and thus if you have image based navigation, the robots won't be able to read beyond your homepage.

Create alt tags on images to name them, if relevant use keywords in the image names.

Make sure the right keywords are used on your meta tags, page descriptions and page titles, do not use a string of keywords for your page titles or descriptions, some search engines don't like this and view it as spam/cheating. Each page should have titles, descriptions, and keywords relevant to the information on that specific page.

Use keywords in your page headers.

4. Submission

You can use www.submitexpress.com to submit your website to multiple search engines for free at once.

Submit your site to www.dmoz.org - Google rates this highly and a listing will greatly boost your ranking.

5. Patience

Expect it to take time (up to three months even) to achieve a good ranking from all of your efforts. Have patience and keep it up every single month without fail. As soon as you stop search engine optimisation work (and your competitors do not) they will stride ahead of you for your keywords once more.