Introduction
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings.
It is an online marketing strategy used to increase a Web site's visibility to the millions of people who find information and services on the Internet. SEO involves optimizing the structure of your site and the text that appears on it, as well as obtaining links to your site from other sites, to help its popularity rating with search engines.

hierarchical structure of your site
Before creating your web site, you must first define how the hierarchical structure of your site will look once completed. The IronPoint CMS web site hierarchy is built by creating parent and child web pages.
The best way to design your hierarchy is to think of it as a family tree. The following is an example of basic web site hierarchy. A web page is considered a Parent page if it has pages under it in the hierarchy. These "sub-pages" are the Child pages.

In addition to their position within the hierarchy, you must also decide what type of content each page will contain. In the example above, you can see that each of the pages has a type associated with it. Some will contain General Content while others will contain Surveys or Site Maps. Page type is important as it defines the structural elements that will be available for that page when creating its content

• Images
Optimizing your images is the best way to improve the download speed of your Web pages. A good rule of thumb is to strive for no one image being larger than 10 Kb. This is especially hard with animations, but if you can do it, you'll have some great fast images.
Also, after you optimize your images, you should call them in your HTML with the height and width specified in the image tag. This will allow the browser to continue rendering the Web page while the image downloads in the background.
• HTML
Once you have your images down to a reasonable size, try streamlining your HTML. You will find sites out on the Internet that advocate removing all extraneous tags, to the point of removing the final </body> and </html>. I do not think this is a good idea, but you can remove all the unnecessary attributes created by some editors, and use the defaults of tags as much as possible. For example, if you create a table and you want the cellpadding and cellspacing to be 2, then leave out those attributes. That is the default for a table.
• Page size
With small images and clean HTML, you can still end up with a page that takes forever to download because there is so much information. If you are striving for a speedy download, limit your page total size (including images) to about 30 Kb.
• Tables
Nested tables are a common cause of slow pages. They are so tempting to use as they improve the layout enormously, but they take a long time for the browser to render. It's not that the page didn't download, but with multiple tables in tables, the browser has to work harder to display the page. It cannot display any part of the page in the tables until it has figured out how to render all the tables that are nested.
• Advertisements
Many advertisements are served from a different Web server than the Web page. If that server is down or slow, it will impact the loading of any page they are called from. The same is true for counters and other external CGIs and images that are not on the same Web server.