SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a very important aspect of any website.  You want the website to become visible to search engines for consumers to find and utilize your website. Below are some quick tips that you can do to improve your search engine visibility:

Google Analytics is a very strong and powerful tool used all over the world for SEO improvement. There have been books, documentation, seminars and classes based around GA. Find out where your users are coming from, what keywords, how long, the websites bounce rate and more.
The installation is very easy, Google will generate a code snippet for you, you copy/paste that code at the bottom of your page before the closing tag.

Google Webmaster Tools is also a great free resource to help Google index your website, you can manage sites and site maps using these tools. Another free and easy way to help Google index your website.

Geo Tags can be very important if you have your business localized, the tags for these include: geo.region, geo.position, geo.placename. Find your country subdivision code. To save you some time the, code for the United States is “US.” Examples of those geo tags would look like:

<meta name="geo.position" content="latitude; longitude">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Place Name">
<meta name="geo.region" content="Country Subdivision Code">

Your standard meta tags can range from, copyright, keywords, description, and language declaration, those can look something like what we have below. Make sure not to get too carried away with meta tags because that can also hurt you by increasing file loading time, stick with the basics. Keep the spiders happy and they will help you with your rank.  Remember also for the description meta tag keep it under 225 characters.

< meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c) 2007-2008 www.ryancoughlin.com" />
<meta name="author" content="Ryan Coughlin" />
<meta name="description" content="Professional web site development and graphic designer serving the Kennebunk, Maine and Burlington, Vermont and the surrounding areas - Specializing in XHTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript" />

The title tag, I have been reading other articles and searching for more information and I have found, put “what you do” instead of “who is doing it” first so an example could be: “Professional Web Site Design Development and Graphics by Ryan Coughlin” vs. ryan coughlin – web and graphic designer: the portfolio of

Remember that text on the page holds more weight with indexing than alt text does, so try to keep the text on your site in HTML versus using text within an image.

With that round up, you have a few small SEO tips that you can take in too affect to use within your website and future clients. I plan on writing some more on the geo tags, but go in to much more detail on there use.