There are a number of simple tips to follow if you want your website to rank well in search engines.Many people are confused about the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) and think that the industry is shrouded in mystery but there are easy ways to ensure that your website is easily discovered.The first thing to do is to find out what keywords your customers are searching for as there is no point optimising for phrases which will not generate traffic towards your website.Sometimes the correct keywords are easy to select because if you are an online art shop then you will probably want to optimise for the phrases art supplies and art materials.If you are not sure what keywords best suit your website then the best thing to do is to investigate what phrases are driving traffic to your competitor's websites as they will likely be relevant to your business.It can take a lot of time and effort to get your website on the first few pages of a search engine if you have chosen a competitive keyword so if you want quicker results you may want to add your region as a suffix.Putting where you are based at the end of your keyword may help you drive more relevant traffic towards your website by encouraging local customers to visit instead of international web users who might not be appropriate for your business.Once you know your keywords it is time to enter them into the metadata of your website as this will demonstrate to a search engine that your site is a relevant landing page.It helps to have a keyword in the url title as well as the page title and the search engine description and in my experience it works best to make your keyword as prominent as possible in any metadata.This means that if you want to optimise for the search term art supplies, you should start your url, page title and search engine description with the phrase art supplies because this will encourage a high search engine ranking.The next step of on-page optimisation is to ensure your keyword features in your H1 and H2 tags as well as in the body of any content but this should not be repeated to often as search engines will regard this as 'keyword stuffing' and disregard your site.Some SEO specialists will tell you that it is all about off-page optimisation but the building blocks of any successful SEO strategy should start with on-page optimisation.