You have an existing site that isn't showing well on the engines and you cannot, for whatever reason, start from scratch or make any major visible changes. In some cases you may find that you don't even need to and that the site is basically search engine friendly but simply not optimised for high search engine positions.

First all examine your site's features:

• Is it static or dynamic?
• Is it in frames?
• Is the majority of the text graphical?
• Is it graphics intensive or in flash?
• Is it slow to download?
• Is there tons of code bloat such as javascript sitting at the top of the source code?
• Does each page have keyword rich html body copy?
• Does each page have a title and meta tags tailored to match that page's text?
• Is your homepage a splash page?
• Are there text links throughout the site or is the only form of navigation in flash, an image map or drop down boxes?

NEXT Step: Search Engine Optimisation - Optimising Static Sites