Being found in the organic search results of Google (and the other search engines such as MSN & Yahoo) requires patience, and adherence to a few basic rules. Here are some SEO tips that you might find useful in your quest to be found.

What Google wants

Try and look at your site with 'Googly Eyes', i.e. look for these key ingredients:

• If Content Is King, then
• Links are the Knights of the Round Table, and
• Document structure, Site Structure, and Crawlability form major parts of the castle (enough of the medieval theme...)

Of course, there's a whole lot more to it:

Content is King - What makes good content for Google?

That's the wrong question to ask. Instead, your question should be: What makes good content for your site visitors? And the answer is fairly simple. Create unique, compelling content that matches the interests of your audience and the language that your audience is using. When you do that, you are already on your way to search engine optimization. Search engine optimization begins with great content that corresponds to customer insight. This customer insight comes from a number of sources, including web logs, specialized tools and of course, customer surveys (sometimes a few simple phone calls will do more for customer insight than 2 days of log file analysis).

Links are the Knights of the Round Table - What makes a Good Link?

'Click Here' - How many pages feature this meaningless link? While a human site visitor will easily understand what the link is all about, the majority of search engines will assume that the link points to a page that is about the topic of 'Click here' - definitely not a desired interpreation, unless you want to rank highly for the search term 'Click here'. Here's a tip on how to create keyword-rich links that Google likes.

Document Structure, Site Structure and Crawlability

To help Google in its quest to index and 'understand' your web site, it is important that your web pages follow some basic rules: use the <title> tag wisely is one of these rules. Another basic rule: Ignore the myth of the <META> tag. Several years ago, it used to be enough to stick all your keyword into the 'header' section of your HTML document (i.e. the part that precedes the actual content and describes the page to the Search Engine). Well, those days are definitely over. Most search engines will largely ignore contents in the meta tags, with a few exceptions.

There are a lot more tips where these came from. Sign up for the monthly newsletter "Get SET" and receive your regular dose of Search Engine-Tips.