A friend asked me to take a quick look at his website for him. He’s not a web designer or an IT guy, so he made some pretty predictable mistakes, some relating to search engine optimization.

Over the years, SEO has been part science, part art, part b.s. Clever webmasters have tried to find ways to trick the search engines, and the search engines find ways around those tricks and punish the sites that use them.

Lesson one in SEO is to forget the tricks. The search engines want to find pages that are relevant to what the person is searching for. That should be your guiding principle. I.e., “what would someone be looking for that would make them happy to find my site?” Keep that in mind as you build your page.

For example, let’s say you’ve figured out the perfect recipe for a cup of no-sugar, dark hot chocolate and you want to tell the world about it (or sell your mix).

You might think your ideal search is “no sugar dark hot chocolate mix.”

Here’s where you have to do some keyword research. Which is better, “no sugar,” “sugar free,” or maybe even “low carb”? Try several different versions of your search in a keyword tool and find out which one gets the most traffic. Once you have a search phrase that gets a lot of traffic and actually relates to what you have to say, then do the following.

Your basic checklist

File names — Name your page something like “no_sugar_dark_chocolate_mix.html.”

Title tags — An html page has a title tag. Make sure that tag has your keywords in it, like “No sugar dark hot chocolate mix — best ever!”

Keywords — Html pages have headings, usually in h tags. The headings are a good indication of what’s important on that page, so make sure your keywords are in those tags.

Alt tags for images — Your img tags have a place for an “alt” tag, which allows you to say what the image is, or what it’s about. Put a relevant image on your page and label it with something like “a cup of no sugar dark hot chocolate.”

Once you’ve built your page, you also want to get incoming links, preferably with your keywords in the links.

That’s the very basics. It gets more complicated than that, but you should at least start with this.