Getting a new website up and running is only the first part of an extended job for anyone looking to successfully market their business online.

What everyone wants to know is just how difficult (or easy) it will be to start getting good rankings from Google searches as quickly as possible, and exactly what they need to do to make it happen.

Keywords

Although keywords and meta tags still have a vitally important role to play, today's SEO approaches need to put a high level of content-driven user focus into the mix too.

Choosing keywords is an art in itself and can often mean getting an outside opinion to identify exactly what needs to be highlighted.

Long tail organic keywords consist of more than four keywords, and they can provide a good level of focus. Some research points to them being responsible for more than 80% of all organic traffic on the entire internet.

Robots.txt

Google and other search engines use bots to “crawl” the net and index the pages of websites. This means that if there are areas of your site that you don't want on public display, perhaps because they're not ready to be launched yet, you might want to tell the so-called “spiders” to look away.

To do this for your own website, you can make a simple file called “robots.txt”; this tells a search engine indexing bot to leave some, or all, of your pages alone. In WordPress sites, you can simply adjust the privacy settings.

This gives you the ultimate control for deciding when you want your site to be live, and then you just make the necessary changes to allow indexation to begin.

Creating content

The increasing sophistication of the search algorithms used by the likes of Google and Bing means that the old methods of cramming keywords onto webpages aren't enough to achieve SEO results anymore.

Content is king these days, and it needs to be coherent, well written, on message and regularly updated.

This is the true deciding factor between getting good SERPs or languishing well down the page counts of rankings.