Web Site Optimizations

1. Optimizing for Google
Google is the most influential search engine. When you download the Google toolbar it gives each page you visit a ranking. Mine (jameswiseman.com) is 5/10. (google.com and microsoft.com are both 10/10).
First, add your site to google. Here is the link: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Add your site to DMOZ.org. The data in this site seems to be mirrored across tons of different search engines. And with google, the more external links you have the better your rating will be (try, for example searching Google for all web sites containing the phrase jameswiseman.com - you'll get tons). Also goto Alexa.com and try your domain - they maintain a list of linking into your site. (Note: Alexa does not work for individual subdomains - you will just get the stats for the primary domain).
I have seen articles that classify the Alexa toolbar as "Spyware". Although this is technically true, the same claim can be made of other toolbars such as Google's. The following page describes this, and provides details on the Pitfalls of the Alexa ranking system. http://simplythebest.net/info/spyware/alexa_spyware.html
The site http://www.tipsntutorials.com/Top-Directories/ provides a list of search engines and their submission conditions. It is worth spending some here submitting your site.
Now for Google itself. Google does not encourage "Linking Karma" across the web. By this I mean that your page rank is penalised if you link externally. Each site's page rank is determined by external linkages. If a site links to yours, it "leaks" PageRank to you. Similarly, if you link to a site, then you leak PageRank.
Check out http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html for a more detailed description of Google PageRank

2. Choosing Your Keywords
I have pictures of places on my page. The page titles used to begin "Photos of ..." - these were my keywords. I then found out about this website: TrafficZap Keyword Suggestor I entered simple phrases like "Photos Of.." and "Pictures of" and found that the search phrase "Pictures of" is more common than "Photos of". I changed my pages, and within two weeks my hits went up from 300 a day to 500 a day.
So the advice is this. Consider other phrases that are similar to your chosen keywords and go to Traffic Zap to compare them.

3. Meta Tags
Meta tags are important since most search engines use them to index your pages instead of indexing the whole page. Info on writing suitable meta tags compatible with most search engines can be found at batkhela.com
Although important on Google, meta tags are no where near as imporatant in their page ranking algorithm. Try to concentrate on getting other high ranked sites to link to yours.

4. Generic Page and Keyword Optimizations
First identify the keywords/phrases for which you which you want to be top. Then:
1) Ensure your TITLE tag is the first tag in the HEAD area of your page
2) Consider using simple text headers with you keywords as opposed to images/banners. Search engines will recognise words, but not pictures!
3) Ensure your keywords appear at least three times in your page.
4) Ensure your keywords are as close as possible to the beginning of the page.
5) Ensure your keywords are present in the "alt" section of your images. (e.g. img src = "image" alt = "keywords"
6) Ensure some of your keywords appear in text links.
7) Ensure your keywords appear in as many areas of your page as possible, e.g. Title Tags, Meta Tags, Heading Tags, Body, Etc
8) Put all Javascript at the end of the html file. Search engines do not read javascript and it just pushes your keywords down the html page.

4.1 Text vs Images
You will notice that most of the pages on my site have a simple text header. There are two reasons for this: 1) To reduce bandwidth. 2) To make the page more visible on search engines. A pretty graphic at the top of the page will make your page look great. but search engines will not be able to extract and index keywords from an image. A standard text header will increase the chance of your ranking imporving.

5. Tracking Your Site Ranking
To help you with this there is a nice free app WebCEO at WebCEO.com that will analyse your site and make suggestions. It will also track your ranking on different search engines to help you guage if its having an effect.
Alexa.com provides a ranking based on the number of people who access your site through their toolbars. If your site is in the top 500,000 in the world, you get some reasonable stats. If you dip under 100,000 then you have achieved what I consider to be the holy grail! (Note: Alexa does not work for individual subdomains - you will just get the stats for the primary domain).

6. See The Results
I have applied these simple rules to JamesWiseman.com, and the results have been spectacular:
April 2004 Stats Pre-optimization.
July 2004 Stats Post-optimization.
As you will see, at the lowest point in April, my stats fell to 97 hits in one day. That's about one hit every 15 minutes. Then in July the hit rate climbed to 1434 - that's very nearly 1 hit per minute (1440 would have done it!)
Comparing the averages gives a better indication, i.e. 150 vs 700. An extention of the latest hit rate across next month will boost the average over 1000.
It is worth noting that the improvement in stats witnessed over the latter half of July 2004 is due to a different factor altogether. The key to the stats increase can be accredited to Google images. I have over 800 unique images on my site, most replicated as thumbnails. Google indexed each of these, massively increasing my site visibility in the process.