How to Make Sure Your Site is Search Engine Friendly

So you have an outstanding website, perfectly designed to your taste. You can’t be any happier when you finally see your business go online.

But that’s just the beginning of the story . . .

Online properties (websites in layman’s term) can be non-profitable entities if they cannot be found by search engines. To maximize your ROI, make sure your website complies with the search engine rules. How do you make sure your site is search engine friendly? It has to (1) be crawlable, (2) have good linking structure, and (3) have the keywords in the right places.

Here are some notes to keep in mind for startup website owners:

1. Use the staple title meta tag, description tag, and H1/H2 tags to accommodate keywords.
2. Give a little push to the spiders by using an XML sitemap and robots.txt.
3. Make sure you have a larger portion of text content than images or animations. And yes, avoid all Flash.
4. Link to important content or keywords. This makes the important terms highly visible, and leads the spider to follow the next link.
5. Non-keyword rich session IDs in the URL are not search engine friendly.
6. Include contextual links and footer links in your page.
7. Use canonical URLs. Practice absolute linking.
8. Use NOODP and NOYDIR in your robots meta tags. This practice allows your description meta tag (instead of the site description you have in directories) to be the displayed information for your website when you appear in the SERPs.
9. Distribute fresh and reader-friendly content like article features/news items/blog posts via RSS.
10. Link structuring must start from your most important page – to the second most important page – and so on.

Of course, the most important key is to keep your site black-hat free – which means not entertaining cheat SEO practices. Hopefully following these tips, coupled with progressive link building efforts, can keep your site within the radar of the search engine spiders.