Search engine optimisation (seo) is a long term strategy, therefore it is important to look to the future in terms of how search engines will (probably) work. For example, search engines are becoming increasingly sensitive to thematic content and words which have specific relationships. Such principles should form part of a "future-proofing" methodology. What works today may not work tomorrow. However, there are some fundamental principles which will always be important. These boil down, essentially, to the following:

1. You must ensure that the site uses a search engine friendly structure to begin with.
2. You must find out exactly what words and phrases people searching for your product or service are likely to use. This ideally should be assessed before building your website.
3. Then you must ensure that these words and phrases are built into the site in a systematic way.
4. Then you must get links from well-ranked sites, using these words and phrases as link text and placed in relevant contexts.
5. Then you must manually submit the site to a few key engines and key web directories.
6. Search engines tend to have a bias towards large, well-established sites. Thus the principle of putting out lots of pages helps - it increases the size of your site. The more content there is the more there is for the search engines to index. "Content is king" - so long as it is good content - poor quality content simply placed to trick the search engines into giving you artificially high positioning is an abuse of their service and will annoy your customers!