That said, there are ways of making whatever system there is work in your favour. The easiest part to address is what appears on your website rather than what underpins it. The first thing you check, whether you put your website together yourself or left it to a Web designer, is whether you can highlight the text by right clicking on your mouse. If you can't, then it's there as an image rather than as words. This matters, because the search engines will see it as 'some image or other' and won't add it to their lists; you need to be seen with words. Replace what you have with text; either look again at your web design program or contact your web company and get them to change it.

You might now be ready to make sure your site is being indexed, but watch out. Have you written it carefully, making sure all the right keywords are prominent? Suppose you sell rivets, or consultancy. Have you got 'rivets' or 'consultancy' in your main headline, or in your standfirst? If they're not there, then the search engines can't see them. They should be prominent in the headlines, frequent in the text (and early rather than too far down); clever-clever questions in a headline just won't be understood by the search engines.

There's a load of other stuff the search engines can't see at the moment (these things can change with a bit of inventiveness and the flick of a switch). Flash animation is something designers love and search engines hate, so if your landing page is an animation then you're automatically invisible to Google. If your key messages are in an animation or graphic, then once again, they're invisible to searches as they stand at the moment.

You might have noticed something by now. Search engines tend to favour straightforward sites with copy that tells you what the site's about and what it's doing, with no sophistry or undue elaboration. This is why I like the search engines' approach.

There are other pieces of SEO you can slot onto your website that will help the search engines prioritize it higher than people who haven't bothered. Before we explore any of them, though, a quick check: do you know what to do with web authoring and HTML?

If not, then the chances are you'll need to use a good web designer to put your site together for you. You can get a software package that will put it together for you. Many of my own sites have been designed in Microsoft Publisher or Rapidweaver on the Mac, and they look pretty good.

There's only one problem: a colleague had a look at one of the ones in Rapidweaver to check whether it was findable by the search engines. The first thing she said was that there were no optimized tags in the <title> section at the top of the page. The title tag is one of the most important things the search engines look for when assessing my site, she said. There was also no meta description tag, which would help me control what Google said about me. The thing is, there was no way using the pre-designed template my software package was offering I would be able to put those tags and other bits of code in. So it was "objective business decision time"again: would that make a sufficient difference to me to mean either I had to learn HTML from scratch (probably a bad option given the sophistication of other sites) or pay someone to design a new site with SEO built in at all levels? The decision will be different for each individual business.

If you don't yet have a website and are looking at using any of the inexpensive or free software on the web or at retail stores to build one, do consider that a lot of the code you'll need may be behind a door the package won't let you open. Even if it lets you copy and paste lumps of code from individual websites onto your site, the package might not let you put it in the right place.

Let's assume you now want to design your own website, or commission a website from a designer. If you're technically literate you'll want to think about putting in some of the elements of SEO that are invisible to the human eye and may be less obvious. Here are a few tips:

Do watch those designers like the proverbial hawk. Many are excellent, but there are others who love nothing better than to put Flash animation and nothing else on your home page (the search engines won't see it), or to make your site look like their masterpiece rather than your marketing collateral. It's your property and don't let them forget it. Check your contract with them too – you've got to own the content, not them, and if you can afford to pay enough that you own the design as well, so much the better. Try not to end up like a contact of mine who fell out with his designer and hosting company and ended up unable to update his website because it was their property contractually.

Much of what people tell you about SEO makes sense until you try it. One book I read said that you should always have your domain name as the main address of a website. It is true that a few years ago, I had a note from someone about interviewing him about his professional use of the Internet for his growing business; when I noticed his company website was actually www.hiscompany.tesconet.com, I didn't take up his offer. Nevertheless, content seems to rule. I have a website at www.clapperton.co.uk. Actually that's a fib; if you type www.clapperton.co.uk into your browser you'll be forwarded to my site, which will say it's at clapperton.co.uk but it's actually at http://homepage.mac.com/guyclapperton/Personalpage/. Type Guy Clapperton into Google and you still find my site as the number one hit. Oddly, my colleague who had a look at my site for SEO said this would make it difficult for search engines to pick it up, but it still comes up top when you search for my name.

A quick sanity check, though: this works for me because I'm using my own name and frankly there aren't many other Guy Clappertons out there; if my name were John Smith I might be feeling differently (with apologies and due respect to any John Smiths reading this). If I were searching for myself as 'UK technology journalist' then whole bunches of them come above my listing on the results page. This is where once again it is vital to understand how your customer operates and uses the web; I know perfectly well that no editor has so few contacts they'll Google for 'UK technology journalist' so I haven't pursued it. If your customer works in a more generic way and searches for terms rather than specifically for you, you'll find it more valuable to spend some time building your business up in terms of search-friendliness.

That's enough on SEO for the moment. There's a little more about how to choose the right keywords in the next chapter where we talk specifically about blogging. For the moment, I'm ready to move on!

The basic method of setting up a PPC account is simple. You find a PPC system (we'll list some in a second), give it a credit card number and put some money into it, upload an ad, associate keywords with it and bid for these keywords. The highest bidder ought to win the highest placing, but the search engine also sanity checks your link for relevance. It guesses at this according to how many people have clicked through to your website before.

At the time of writing, Google was definitely top of the tree in terms of search engines and there was no obvious competitor, in spite of new businesses offering 'semantic' searches (so you can ask a question in English rather than put in a keyword in). That method is unproven as yet. The first place to go, then, is Google and its AdWords scheme, which you'll find at www.google.co.uk/adwords.

Google believes in making everything simple for people who want to hand it money (a philosophy every business probably shares!). You go to the site, either click the 'Sign up for AdWords online' link or, if you prefer, phone the number on the site, and select which of the packages you want (if you're just beginning then the starter edition is the one to opt for). The site starts helping again: it will look for your business and see whether it can fill in the form for you and save you the bother. It asks you which country and in which area your business wants to advertise, so you can be really specific: the early days of the Internet were littered with stories of people in Tooting being approached by others in Wisconsin wanting their cars washed. You pay, you upload an image if you wish, but at the very least you get to advertise every time someone searches for your keyword; up to the level of your budget, that is.

The other ad schemes of comparable size to Google are Yahoo! and its Search Marketing scheme at searchmarketing.yahoo.com, and Microsoft's Ad centre at adcenter.microsoft.com. Yahoo! will put your ad on AltaVista, CNN, Infospace, Juno and others and Google will add your ad to AOL, Ask.com, Earthlink and others.

For my money Google is the best option because of its ubiquity, and you should also look at the same company's AdSense scheme. This is different to AdWords because it allows other sites to carry advertising; you may have seen boxes on websites with 'Advertisements by Google' on them.

The most important thing to watch out for while you're running a PPC programme is that you're getting value for money. This is a business activity and you need to be utterly certain you're making money out of it.

Plenty of people will try to blind you with how much this sort of activity is going to be worth over the lifetime of a customer. PPC, they argue, brings the customer in once and then they keep buying, so it's worth spending £50 on getting them just the once. I'd say it isn't; if they went to Google the first time they'll do the same search again. Also, maybe getting them to follow your tweets or read your blog isn't actually going to turn all of them into long-term customers.

You ought to factor considerations like that into the price you're prepared to bid. Likewise, you need to consider the likelihood that only some of your click-through visitors will spend money, so your cost per sale is higher than your cost per click. The sooner you can work out what percentage of people actually spend money when they click through to your site, the sooner you'll know what a sensible margin is.

Never lose sight of the fact that you control the bids – and you can cap the amount you spend, so if you don't want to lose more than £150 a day then you can cap it at that rate and you're safe.

There are good things and bad things to do with pay per click. Do remember the following:

Finally, a few don'ts:

The really bad news is that you have to submit to most directories manually. There honestly isn't a simple automatic way of doing it. Ignore the spammers who email you and tell you they can do it automagically for only $100 or whatever, they'll be offering to flog you Viagra this time next week and it'll never arrive.

The worse news is that to get listed on Yahoo! costs a fair bit – $300-600 per annum. But once again, look at what it's going to do for your business. If it isn't going to pay for itself you don't want to do it, simple as that. If you still think it's worth the cost, read on.

First, a little sanity check. Go to http://dir.yahoo.com and search for your company name. You might find you're already in the directory. If not, do a little check; tick 'the Web' at the top and search the Internet instead. Note that my own website didn't come up in the directory at all but was still no. 1 when I searched the Internet for Guy Clapperton. This will be a help to know if your business has an unusual name; I'm not in competition with that many Guy Clappertons, so my absence from the directory doesn't bother me. If you're a carpenter and want people to find you, it might be different.

Go to the Yahoo! Directory main page, browse the categories and find the best match for your site. There's a box in every category marked 'Suggest a site';enter your site, follow the instructions on screen and be ready with a credit or debit card. You can put your business into several categories and pay for the privilege each time.

The Open Directory is free, which sounds better. It doesn't guarantee a listing after you've submitted, though. Submission is easy: go to www.dmoz.org, find a category, pick 'Suggest URL' and follow the instructions. Your page will be examined eventually by one of 8,000 editors managing 70,000 categories. It will take time. They're human and they admit they lose entries sometimes.

There are also second-tier players, the smaller people in the directory market. There are literally hundreds of them and I'm not about to start listing them, as loads of them come and go all the time. Remember also that many of these take a feed from Yahoo! and the Open Directory.

So far I've been talking about the global directories, and by now you'll have seen the deliberate mistake in the previous section. I suggested you might be a carpenter, and you might want to be listed so that people can find you more easily when they search the web.

Well, there's no reason why not. But if you have a particularly web-savvy set of customers, they might be looking in the local directories instead. Have a look at Qype; it's a series of directories by area and people like hairdressers not only get listed, they get reviewed. Your business might be better suited to a paid-for listing in there. Finding them is easy: search for (yourtown) directory and see what comes up. Remember to look before you leap: if you run a restaurant, for example, be prepared to get bad reviews as well as good ones if your local directory runs reviews. It can still work in your favour as long as the good outweigh the bad.

However, do not try to scam the system by writing your own reviews. One of my favourite TV programmes is Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, in which the chef rescues ailing restaurants. In one of the British episodes he found an online review of a particularly poor restaurant that said it was better than either his or Jamie Oliver's eateries. He asked the owner whether he'd written the review himself. The owner denied it twice then eventually broke down and confessed; he'd been desperate for customers so he'd invented the review. It didn't get him customers. It got him humiliation on national television. Be warned!

There are also a number of directories specifically designed for the business user. In the UK, one of the main ones is BT Tradespace (www.bttradespace.com). You don't need to be a BT customer to get into this and the basic 'shop front' is free. Go to the link on the right of the page, sign up and decide which category you need to get into. You're allowed to upload podcasts and videos free of charge.

Also check out Ziki (www.ziki.com), whose blog said it was being rethought as we went to print. Simply go to the site and click the link to register on the right; like a Google Ad, you won't be charged unless someone actually logs on to your site.

OK, cheating's not quite what I'm about to suggest. But you might find a listing on someone else's website will do very well for pushing you into a search listing. By now you'll have gathered that I'm overly fond of searching for my own name on Google to make sure I'm in the right place and that nobody else is ranking above me. So I enter Guy Clapperton, my website comes up and, four places down, my LinkedIn profile is listed too.

That's right. Social networking site LinkedIn is putting my name out there and doing a bit of the SEO and directory placement for me. I search for our local Indian takeaway, which doesn't have its own website, and guess what: it comes up, but under the VirtualNorwood local directory and I'm taken straight to its entry. Your BT Tradespace or Ziki entry will work for you in a similar way.

So, you want to be found but you're not sure you want to go to the trouble of putting a full-blown website together? That's no problem. Social media is the way!

As this book went to print a new form of directory was emerging, called the semantic web. The first sign of this was a search engine – the company behind it hates that term but I'll use it – called Wolfram Alpha. This could throw a lot of the rules of searching out of the window, but don't write everything else off just yet.

The idea is that existing search engines don't work as they ought to. If you came to me in person and asked for a good restaurant near Crystal Palace, where I live, and instead of recommending somewhere I sent you to some sort of listings page, I'd appear rude. If you asked me what was on at the local cinema and instead of telling you I gave you a web reference, you'd also consider me impolite. It's different if you're talking to a computer, naturally enough. Google gives you a list of websites that might help you, based on keywords you've put into the search engine, and we all find it perfectly normal.

That, say the semantic web people, isn't good enough. What if there were a website (and it's been tried with AskJeeves.co.uk) which allowed you to enter a question in English – say, what's the weather like in Manchester? – and it gave you the information straight away? That's what Wolfram Alpha does. At least, it does with that question. In other cases it's less straightforward. I tried – on day one – entering my own name to see what it came up with. Google came out with my own website, numerous sites on which my articles and journalism appear and even a book of short stories to which I'd forgotten I'd contributed in the mid-1990s. Wolfram Alpha told me it wasn't sure what to do with my query.

This might mean a number of things. It could mean the new search engines have an egomaniac detector, but I doubt it. It could mean that the one I tried was very American-centric, a criticism it has certainly faced; I tried entering Paul McCartney's name and it gave me his birthday and age but no more, which suggests it was underpopulated with information early on.

The jury, in other words, remains out on this new form of searching. Certainly Google had announced a substantial redesign as we went to print and was aiming to start behaving in a similar way, or at least attach more importance to different media like video and photography. The rules about how to get to the top of these piles – if indeed Wolfram Alpha doesn't do away with these piles of pages completely – are continually being rewritten.