Create Relevant Title Tags - Many search engines give additional weight to the text appearing in the HTML tag for your page. Note that this is not the title that you see in the body of your web page. Rather, it is the non-visible text in the HTML code that the browser uses to display in the title bar of the browser window. The search engines use that tag as part of its algorithm to determine what your page is about.



A number of new webmasters don't bother to set the title tag to something meaningful. Instead, they just put their site name in the title tag of every page on their website. They should, instead, put the site name only in the title tag of their home page, and place a meaningful title on each individual page of their site. For example, on a page that describes a product "Widget XYZ", the title tag should read "Widget XYZ Product Features" or something like that. If you feel that the name of your website is important to have on every title tag, place it at the end of your title for the sub-pages on your site, for example, "Widget XYZ Features - XYZ Company".

Add Text to Your Images, Flash and Videos - The first thing you should note about search engines is that their software can only read text. Not text that you embed in an image or text that you place inside a Flash file or those that appear in a video, but text like the text you see everywhere in articles, for example - plain, unadulterated, ordinary text.

While it's true that some search engines have the crude ability to scan a Flash file, you cannot assume that this ability is sophisticated enough to obtain all the information you want them to have. Maybe only Google can do this, and even then only to extract straightforward links embedded in the file. And certainly no search engine I know can view an image file or video and determine the text that it contains.

This is not to say that you cannot create a photo-album site, Flash game site or a video site that ranks in the search engine results page. You can still place your pictures, Flash, videos on your site. However, you should write content for each of these non-text elements to describe them.

For example, you should describe each picture in the "alt" text for the image. For those who don't know what I'm saying, images are put into a web page using HTML code like the following:

Notice the "alt" part in the example HTML code above. Here, I described the image as a picture of a search engine ready website. You should of course replace that text with a brief description of what your image really shows. While search engines cannot actually see your picture, they can read your "alt" text and will include that in their index for your web page.

Validate Your HTML Code - By validating, I mean checking to make sure that your HTML code does not have errors. Note that I'm not talking about spelling or grammar errors here. I'm referring to the underlying HTML code that allows the web browser to format your web page according to how you want it to appear. If you use a WYSIWYG web editor like Dreamweaver, Nvu or Mozilla Composer, such code is usually generated behind the scenes by the editor as you type your text.

Whether you write your HTML code by hand or use a WYSIWYG web editor, it is a good idea to always run the final code through HTML and CSS validators.

While the search engines don't care whether your HTML code is error-free, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index. If your HTML code contains errors, it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine's database. The errors, while undetectable in a web browser, may lead the search engine software to think that some of the text on your page is part of the HTML formatting information rather than your site's content. As a result, the search engine may ignore that text, and your web page will not be shown in its results page.

Eliminate Apparent Content Duplication - If you use a blogging service, blogging software or some other content management system (CMS), you will need to watch out for duplicate content on your website.

By duplicate content, I mean pages on your website that are identical to other pages on your site. If you manually create your website using a web editor, this will probably never happen. However, some of the automated services mentioned earlier create alternate routes to the same article. For example, a content management system or blogging software may duplicate the same article you wrote under two different URLs, such as http://www.example.com/archive/article-name.html and http://www.example.com/2007/01/05/article-name.html. Another manifestation of this is when your software adds a session id to the URL. Since every visitor receives a different session ID, he/she will link to your page using a different URL.

The problem with duplicate content on your own site is link dilution. Google and other search engines take into account the number of links pointing to your page to determine how important your web page is. If you have identical content appearing on two different pages on your website, some sites will link to one page while others will link to the alternate page. The result is that neither of those pages will be regarded as very important in the search engine's index since you have effectively halved the links pointing to your article.

Find a way to remove that feature in your software or service of allowing your article to be reached under different URLs. In the case of session IDs, see if you can use cookies instead to track individual users. Solutions like blocking out alternative URLs from search engines using a robots.txt filemay seem like a possible solution, but they do not solve the problem of link dilution.

Remove Hidden Text - Nowadays, everyone knows that it is counterproductive to use hidden text on your website. By hidden text, I mean text that is included in the main body of your web page but is not actually displayed on the screen when visitors view your page in a browser. In days of old, some unscrupulous webmasters used such text to add keywords to a web page to influence search engine results. Search engines try to deal with that tactic by not showing pages which they think contain hidden text.

Sometimes search engines wrongly penalize sites even if the hidden text was innocuous - for example, text that only showed for people using a particular browser to tell them that they may not be able to access certain features of the website due to deficiencies in the browser.

Creating a search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that you will get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a necessary first step if you want to rank anywhere near the first few pages of the search engine results. A site that is not search engine ready may not even appear in the results for any query. The tips in this article are the pre-requisites for any website aspiring the top positions in Google, Yahoo, and the other engines.