Whenever a business decides that it should have a website, and spends time and resources on the development of the site, it is rare that it will think of optimizing it for search engines. It's true - they expect and assume that when they create a stunning, animated and flashy site, the traffic will automatically come in. Unfortunately, the fact is that it will take more than simple submissions to search engines to bring traffic to the site, and to be found in search engines.

Its paradoxical, to have companies out there spending tens of thousands building a very beautiful website, but absolutely no resources and effort on the optimization and marketing of the site.

SEO itself is a very complex subject, and understandably, web designers who specialize in creating an aesthetic appeal will not pay attention to it, but with just a little understanding of how search engines work and some knowledge of HTML, you can use these 7 simple steps to help your site perform better in search engines.

Step 1: Use the proper tags for headings and keywords

HTML features six heading styles, from H1 to H6, and allows you to place emphasis on particular words in a paragraph through Bold and Italic typefaces. While many designers simply use CSS to style text to the size and color for aesthetic appeal, search engines read these tags to determine what the page content is about and categorize your page accordingly.

Step 2: Add alternate tags to your images

Images are a very critical element the make up the visual appeal of a website - a website with just plain text will look boring. However, it is important to know the search engines cannot read images, even if you have text within the image. The best way to optimize your images is to add alternate tags for the images.

Step 3: Resolve canonical problems

When a human visitor visits your website at http://www.yourwebsite.com http://yourwebsite.com, and http://yoursite.com/index.html, they will probably see the same content, since most web servers use the "www" subdomain as the default subdomain, and index.html (or .htm) as the default page. However, to the search engine, they are seen as different pages altogether.

Step 4: Put CSS and Javascript in External files

CSS and Javascript code are great tools to enhance the user experience. CSS allows you to tweak the look and feel of a site at a very fine detail, and Javascript allows you to add very powerful widget and functionality to your site. However, it is important to know that both of these are not too good for search engine optimization. Search engine spiders crawl to your site, looking for content, putting Javascript and CSS code on your web page adds load to the search engines to sieve out these code, and thereby dilutes the impact of the keywords you have targeted on your site. Instead, if you need to include CSS or Javascript, consider putting them on an external file and importing the file.

Step 5: Minimize the use of Tables

In the past, nesting tables are the "secret" to laying out your site nicely. The HTML code behind almost every popular portal out there is a bunch of tables nested within tables. However, that trend is a thing in the past. With the evolution of CSS, the job of layout should be handled in CSS. CSS file reduces and reuses defined styles, making it easier for search engines to parse a page.