Search Engine Optimisation
There are many things that affect to your site’s ranking in search engines. Some simple things are listed here: title, description, header elements, links and xml sitemap.
Probably most important thing nowadays is the title. If possible, every page in your site should have unique title and description, which tells something about the page content. Title should contain 1-3 keywords and title of your site. Description should contain few phrases about your site or page. Description not actually help with ranking, but search engines might show it below the link to your site or page. Search engines might as well choose to use a section of your page’s content if it’s relevant considering user’s query.
Using header elements <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc. correctly tells search engines and users which parts of the content is most important and which least important. Links to your site and from your site are also important. Links to your site make sure that users and search engines will find your site. Links from your site should be relevant considering the content of your site. Links to highly appreciated site’s are best, because it raise your site’s ranking as well. Setting the value of the “rel” attribute of a link to “nofollow” will tell search engines not to follow those links. If you have to include pages like “Terms and Conditions” or “Privacy Policy”, you should use nofollow, because those pages are not relevant considering content of your site. Nofollow is also useful if user’s can add their own texts and links to your site, because otherwise it’s really hard to keep up with the quality of links in your site and it might drop page rank of your site.
It’s also highly recommended that you create xml sitemap for Google. You can use Free Online Sitemap Generator for that. Put your xml sitemap into the root folder of your site. After that add your site and xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. For watching how much traffic is coming to your site, you can use Google Analytics. It will tell you a lot about your visitors and how they find your site.
See also Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide from Google!