Where do we begin with SEO or Search Engine optimization?, Yes yes we know you are sat there sighing and we understand that's a natural reaction.

SEO in a word is boring and in another word misunderstood, we can hear you tutting now. Joking apart anyone commencing the SEO for their website is daunted and confused with all the information that is out there, so we are going to try to explain in simple terms about how and why optimizing your site for search engines is important and best of all its free.

The simple truth is you can employ companies like us here at WebMunki to optimize your site plus there are plenty of others out there who offer search engine optimization, but you can do it yourself. Our research shows most people choose to employ others to optimize their sites because they don't understand SEO or don't have the time.

It is definately time consuming optimizing any site be it an ecommerce site, blog or personal pages but you and you alone need to decide to either do it yourself or employ someone to do it for you.

First thing we would suggest is to check out Google Webmaster Central which has plenty of helpful hints. As stated earlier we do offer this service so if you find that you simply don't have the time to do it Webmunki it.

This SEO checklist is a few pointers and not exhaustive of what can be achieve through SEO. We are going to try and explain in the simplest terms and with the help of this easy to follow checklist for SEO the three elements to optimize your website these are as follows

1. On page - This is what should be done on individual pages
2. On site - These are things that can be done across your entire site to improve overall SEO
3. Off page and site - Influencing factors on other sites

On Page SEO

• Page Titles - these should be unique to each page and accurate and should contain the keywords that you are looking to rank eg yourwebsitename and main focus of the page
• Keywords - The use of keywords is fundamental and these should be used in the main content of the page
• Description Meta Tag - Some say this is less important these days but it is in essence a summary of what the page is about and therefore useful.
• URL structure - It is recommended that filenames are accurately described so instead of doc1 use webmunki.co.uk/SEO-checklist use a hyphen (-) rather than and underscore ( _ )  AND DO NOT USE CAPITALS.

On Site SEO

• Site navigation - create user friendly navigation, don't just think SEO. There is no point in search engines finding your site for the end user not to be able to navigate it easily.
• Site structure - this is similar to navigation really, from the main page the user and search engines should be able to find categories and then single pages and using breadcrumb navigation will help.
  Breadcrumb is main page>category>item/single page.
• Duplicate pages - Duplicate content on pages dilute the ranking ability so write good content as this should be about the user not search engines!
• Anchor text - this is the clickable text, use varied and useful text and not 'click here' 
• Images - these too should be optimized use a distinctive file name and not image221 etc.
• Linking to other sites - Linking is an art form and we see so often that people just link for the sake of linking be aware you should link with related quality sites

Off Site SEO

Other sites linking to your site are very good for SEO purposes; again these should be related sites or shopping directories such as our WebMunki shopping directory or you could create a blog.

Even though you need search engines to pick up your site to get ranked it is not the only weapon that you can use to get people to visit your site other marketing tools are available to you. Remember the content should use SEO as a tool but all the content and navigation should also be user friendly as it is the end user you need to impress.