Search Engines are used by over 80 percent of people for finding information on the Web. It makes sense to optimize your website so it can be found easily by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The way it works is that these search companies 'crawl' the web and search for websites and pages. They index all these pages and store the information in huge databases with a web-based interface. When searchers type a certain phrase or keyword, the results are pulled from the database with the (in Google's opinion) most relevant pages on top.

How can you optimize (manipulate) these results to your advantage? There are many techniques used in optimizing a website, but the most important ones are relatively simple and free! 

1. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
2. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
3. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
4. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. 
5. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
6. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
7. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
8. Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
9. Check for broken links and correct HTML
10. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)