Search engine optimisation or SEO remains to be a black art for countless people. A technique so secret that it would be easier to turn base metal into gold. Well, there's no disputing the fact that it's definitely possible to dig really deep and get highly involved in the whole process, but excellent gains can be had by following these 10 relatively easy rules:

1. Research the keywords you intend to use for your site - don't just pull a stack out of thin air. There are many free tools around for this purpose, none better than Google's own keyword tool.

2. Stitch the keywords naturally into your page copy without spamming. Most importantly you are providing a 'good read' for your site visitors, but you are also trying to clearly let the search engine spiders know what your site is about.

3. Write compelling page copy. The better your page copy reads the more likely you are to have people stick around or maybe even dare I say... revisit.

4. Make sure that your website is built with clean compliant code. You want those search engine spiders to crawl happily through your website accumulating all that valuable information about your business, without hitting unwanted brick walls. Don't clutter up your website's page with tons of inline Javascript and CSS, instead link to external files.

5. Do you have images on your page? If that's the case you will want to be sure that all images have an 'alt tag'. This tag provides the capability to describe an image to a screen reader for the visually impaired. An extremely important tag for obvious reasons and also it keeps the search engines happier.

6. Ensure you use your title tag. If you're uncertain where this may be found it sits in the head section of the page code and the resulting title can be seen by site visitors at the top of their browser. Ensure you have a different title on every page and make it descriptive including a couple of important keywords. Don't spam this tag as it's an extremely important area of the SEO process and you want it to count. Keep your page titles to below 70 characters and ensure that you keep your really important keywords in the first 55 characters.

7. Ensure you include the meta description tag. This tag is again positioned in the head section of the code and is the area of copy that is placed with your website's url in the search engine's results. This is your call to action so use a totally different description relevant to every page. For this Google typically truncates your meta description in the SERPs (search engine results page) to approximately 150-155 characters.

8. Try to add content to your site by using a news section or a small blog. All the optimised content that you add to your site will be new content waiting to be included into the SERPs. All this creates new avenues to your website.

9. Now get some links to your site! The search engines like to see other websites linking to yours as it's considered to be a vote of confidence. Write a few articles about a product or service and then upload these to some of the big online article sites like Ezinearticles.com. They permit you to incorporate a link or two in the resource section. Don't also forget to submit your website to some online directories. The leading ones like Yahoo can be expensive but are great for the important link juice. Some will of course be cheaper and some will be totally free. Beware of cheap looking free directories that are never looked after, though there are some really good new free ones out there that seem to be going places: see the link below.

10. So now get social! Get yourself a Twitter account and begin tweeting. Get some followers and approximately every 15 or so tweets you can promote your website with links to important pages etc. Beware that if you start doing this every other tweet your followers will quickly lose interest and unfollow you.

So there you go, nothing like the secret of alchemy!