Meta-tags
Meta tags are the keywords and phrases in your pages that your potential customers might use to find information about your product or company. Meta tags cannot be seen by your audience, but are for Search Engines to easily see the content of your pages.

Easy on the eye
To improve your chances of being listed on portals and directories (and to be generally 'user friendly' on the web) make sure that your website is easy to read, clear to navigate and fast to download.

Content
Provide users with relevant, up to date and useful information that will keep them coming back to your website and written in a way that is search engine friendly.

Avoid frames as well as redirect pages, software such as Flash, or dynamically generated pages. Although these can look good, they can have impact how a search engine can, or will, index your site. Flash or animated .gifs can be seen as a nuisance. There are right ways of using them. Ask for details.'Gateway pages' can be used to achieve a good ranking on search engines.

Links page to other relevant websites. This is good for your audience but more importantly, builds 'link popularity' through reciprocal links, which in turn helps to enhance your search engine ranking and create traffic from other websites.

Don't consider using spamming techniques to improve your ranking as any short-term gain will ultimately lead to long-term loss if your site is blacklisted by the search engines.

Don't be taken in by the promise of submissions to hundreds of search engines! This can easily be done and it is better to spend the time getting your website right for the top 10 or so main search engines and directories where most of your traffic will come from.