Where you should be

By this point you should have covered the following

• You have chosen the keywords and keyword phrases that you want to optimise your site for
• You have checked these in the Google Keywords tool to make sure people do actually search for them
• You have checked on the internet how many websites are chasing the same keywords/phrases and made sure you have a 'cat in hells' chance of competing
• Your HTML code has been validated by W3C so it is clean
• Your CSS has been validated by W3C so it is clean
• Your code has been checked to make sure it is helpful to users and search engines
• Your content has been checked to make sure it isn't, even mistakenly, being seen as scamming or copying

In short you are now no longer disliked by the search engines so the next step is to get the search engines to like you and potentially like you more than they like your competitor's websites.

For this we are going to need some tools.

SEO Tools

There are a number of free tools around on the internet but most need to be treated with a pinch of salt. They are rarely maintained, sometimes not updated, but they all have their uses.

• http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ - will tell you your keyword densities. You need to keep an eye on this to make sure you stay within the 2-6% limits as you optimise your pages
• http://www.seositecheckup.com/ - will keep an eye on a number of items that may affect your SEO as you make changes

The one exception to the 'free but not reliable tools' rule is what Google makes available and nothing is going to be more useful than their Webmaster tools. So if you have not already done so get over to Google Webmaster Tools and create an account.

Making a sitemap.xml file

Google webmaster tools will tell you a great deal about your website in terms of how much of your site it is actually aware of and how it sees it. This means it can be highly misleading if it has only indexed a minority of your pages. To tell it where all the rest are you need to load a an xml file into your root directory so it sits at http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

You can do this manually and Google Webmaster tools contains full instructions on how to do it. Alternatively if your site contains a large number of pages that are ever changing because they are based on database content then creating a script that will update your sitemap.xml regularly is a must.

Making a robots.txt file

This is used by a number of search engines to check what they should and should not crawl and to confirm if they should look for a sitemap xml file, especially if you have not called yours sitemap.xml Again Google Webmaster tools will tell you how to do it.

Throwing the SEO baby out with the bath water!

Just before you begin to optimse you should hang fire. If Google webmaster tools shows that it has no idea of your website's existance before you signed up then you are ready to move on straight away.

Alternatively you may see that Google was very aware of your site and you are well ranked in the search results for words you were not even aware of. Now before you go changing everything stop to consider if there is some way to take advantage of this situation.

You may have accidently become well ranked for a keyword or phrase that others are fighting over tooth and nail and you may be able to use this to your advantage.