SEO on a Budget - Cleaning Up Your Site

The process of getting customers to your site normally involves your winning a place on the first page of a web search that your would-be client sees when he searches for your product.This involves you, whether you like it or not, in the process of buttering up the search engines.
Now it is a fact of life that today's market is dominated by the big players - grocers have Walmart and Tesco to play against, booksellers have Amazon, accountants have Price Waterhouse Coopers - and there is no way you can out-spend them when it comes to advertising or its online equivalents.
You have to be more targeted, cleverer, and more fleet-footed.
The process of getting onto the front page of a Google or Yahoo search is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. It is a black art where a host of real and pretend experts vie to out-think the bots, the robot spiders that the search engines have wandering the web twenty four hours a day and three sixty-five days a year. These bots are examples of artificial intelligence deciding the fate of your site against an ever-expanding and ever more sophisticated set of rules.
The first stage of your 'budget' or even 'zero cost' battle with the bots is to avoid upsetting them. After all they are all looking for an excuse to downgrade or even discard your site and settle for the big boys who pay them the big bucks.
So let's look at some precautions that will help you to avoid down-grading.
1. Avoid spelling mistakes
Spelling mistakes upset the bots. Create your text in a good quality word processing package and use the spell-checker
2. Make sure that all your links work
There are several open-source link-checkers down-loadable on the web: pick one and use it every time you modify your site.
3. Check your HTML
HTML is the language of the internet. Even the best suites of website builder programs fail to give bullet-proof renderings of your design. Like open-source link-checkers, open-source HTML-checkers can save you a lot of grief.
4. Use the "alt" facility in the Image tag.
A tag is an HTML instruction telling your browser how to present your site. They are enclosed in triangular brackets.
The tag that displays your artwork is contained in these brackets, which makes them easy to spot and is in the form:
a href = "address of the artwork" alt = "text to be shown if for any reason the artwork itself isn't"
The "alt" is important because visually impaired surfers will use software that reads out-loud the text on your site and cannot read a picture so the "alt" provides a textual alternative.
So what do you do if your site fails any of these tests. Well you are the author of your site, the website builder took your instructions and built your site, so get back into your source data and clean up your act.
Roger Webb is a retired CEO from Small and Medium Sized (SME) companies in the UK and Continental Europe. In thirty years experience at life at the top he has been instrumental in turning around and setting up a number of specialist subsidiaries in Europe, Africa and beyond, in every case producing stable profits in some of the most testing corporate environments imaginable.
In retirement he has devoted most of his energies in developing a group of wiki sites devoted to helping others to set up eBusinesses. His current sites http://computer-virgin.net/ for new-starters and http://mywebtrade.net/ for those further along the trail are just part of those efforts.

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