What point is there in having a website that nobody sees? The largest source of free web traffic for most websites on the Internet comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN etcetera. Therefore, if you design a search engine friendly or a site with search engine optimization in mind you are likely to rank higher in search engine results and grab more valuable free visitors for yourself.

The Big 3 search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo! and MSN use internet robots known as web crawlers or spiders to crawl and index websites which they then can list within their organic search result pages. Most spiders follow links to a page then read the text content of the page and make a record of it in their own database? this allows the search engines to pull up the listing at any time as people search for it.

In order to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to index and crawl and index your site, the use of frames on your website should be avoided. Frames can often confuse search engine robots and many spiders have difficulty indexing pages created with the use of frames. They could even leave your site without crawling it any further if it is not search engine friendly enough. In addition, frames can make it difficult for users to add a bookmark a particular page on your website without using certain long and complicated scripts.

Don't put valuable text content inside flash movies or in images? remember search engine robots can only read the text on your website source code. Therefore if crucial text is presented in flash movies and or inside images rather than the readable textual form, your website's search engine rankings could be affected dramatically.

Correct use of meta tags on each page is essential, especially correct use of titles and descriptions. This will allow search engine robots to understand straight away what your web pages are about and whether or not to index it. Correct use of meta tags helps to make the search engine robot's job easier so they may be encouraged to crawl your site more often.

Stop using old style HTML methods like tables and font tags to style your page. Instead use div tags and CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. This is because div tags and CSS are a more search engine friendly method and are also more efficient. With the use of div tags and CSS, you can eliminate old style HTML tags and your pages will be much lighter and faster to load.

Make sure that you always put the text you want to be found for on the body text of your page with your most important keywords near the top or beginning of your body text. For example, if your primary keyword is green widgets put the keyphrase green widgets in the first sentence of your body text and repeat the phrase a few more times throughout the page preferably also somewhere in bold or strong text. Always remember that if you don't put your primary keywords on your body text and also in your titles and meta tags etc you make it much harder for your site to be found in search results.