Contrary to popular belief, search engine optimization is not rocket science; all it requires is a little bit of common sense and up-to-date knowledge of the latest search engine developments. If you are planning on search engine optimizing your own website, here are a few basic steps you will need to carry out to optimize your website.

The first step in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is keyword analysis, you can use Google's Sandbox tool to find competitive keywords and also get suggestions on which keywords you should target. It is important to remember that not all competitive keywords are worth targeting, and once you have carried out a thorough analysis of base keywords, you should then proceed to create a list of target keywords.

If you are starting a website from scratch and have not bought a domain name for the website, the first thing you should do is get a domain name that matches your target keywords. For example, if you are targeting the keywords ?Swiss chocolates? you should look for a domain name like swisschocolates.com. There is a high probability that the keyword you are targeting already has a matching domain name that is in use. If this is the case, be creative and try different domain names like Swiss-chocolates.com. Once you have a domain name that matches the keywords you are targeting, the next step is optimizing your site's design elements.

There are numerous design aspects of a website that influence search engine optimization, and the way search engines rank a website. Design aspects like the headings, page titles, banners and image tags have to be taken into account while optimizing a website. It is impossible to explain every single design element involved in SEO, but there are a few elements like the page title, the ?H1? text and the captions and headers of each page that play an important role in search engine optimization.

Although a page's design elements are important, the most important element in search engine optimization is content. Google and other search engines have implemented content centric algorithms like LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) that make it imperative for any website to have meaningful and well written search engine friendly content. Currently, successful websites are content rich and have numerous web pages that have keyword rich content. If you do not know what keyword density you should target, a keyword density of less than 5% is usually a safe bet.

Finally, link building and PageRank also play a pivotal role in search engine optimization. High ranking websites spend thousands of dollars on link building and are constantly working on increasing the number of incoming links to their website. If you are not sure which incoming links to your site will be useful, and which ones will be ignored by search engines, the best option is hiring a SEO firm to carry out link building for your site. You can also choose to buy a link building package for your website to further simplify link building.

For more tips and tricks on SEO visit http://www.hostopen.net