How To Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

Let this be said up front – If your website does not appear in search engine results, you are wasting your time creating one. If you aren’t committed to learn how to make your website search engine friendly, stop right now, back away from your web editor and go back to bed. Your online business will not make money.

Still reading? Great! That means you are committed to learning how to make a search engine friendly website and get noticed by the search engines.

It Is All About The Words

Search engines can only read text. It’s that simple. Some browsers can scan a flash file, but only with limited results. Don’t assume this ability. In other words, don’t put your most important site information in a flash file, a video or an image. The information likely won’t be caught by a search engine.

But wait! You’re probably saying to yourself, “But videos, pictures and flash elements will make my site interesting…and pretty, too!” That’s true. And there’s no reason you can’t include these items into your site. From a website aesthetics point of view, they are great. But just be sure you include a textual description of what is in these visual elements, so the search engine will be able to read the text.

By way of example, if you include a picture in your site, you would be wise to include a description of what the picture contains in your HTML code, like this:

<img src=”name-of-image.jpg” alt=”photo of kid friendly meal”>

Notice: After the “alt” in the code is a phrase that describes what the photo depicts. It is this text that the search engine will be able to detect, and it is this text that will help you achieve better search engine rankings. It is very important!

Similarly, if you include videos or flash files on your site, be sure to also include a text description for the search engines to grab onto.

A good way to remember to do this is to think of it in terms of making your site more accessible to the visually impaired (which is always a great idea anyway). Text can be made larger or read with special text-recognition software. Other visual elements cannot. If you keep this in mind when designing your site, you’ll always remember that when it comes to search engines, text rules.

Check Your Work

If you are using an HTML web editor, it is imperative to check your work to ensure that your code is free of errors. Just as you should check your text to make sure it has no grammatical, spelling or typographical errors, you should check your HTML code for coding errors. To do this, run your code through a code validator.

Remember: Search engines don’t have a moral opinion about whether your code is correct or not, any more than they care whether you’ve taken the time to correct your spelling. All that matters is that the code is formatted correctly so that your web page can be indexed.

If your coding is flawed, a search engine may perceive some of the text on your page as part of your coding, which will cause that text to be ignored. The upshot of that is that the web page containing the error will not show up in search engine results. Part of making a search engine friendly website is to ensure your site gets properly indexed by making sure your code is properly formatted.

The Importance Of The Title Tag

To gain extra search engine power, it’s a good idea to create good title “tags” on your pages. Tags are not seen in the finished web page, but they are what tells the web browser what to display in the title bar of your web browser. If you use Google Chrome, for example, the text on each tab in your browser is the text that was included in the site owner’s title tag. A search engine uses this tag to help determine the subject of your site and to thereby index it.

Title tags have always been, and still are one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings for your webpages. Search engines give a lot of algorithmic weight to the title tag, so remember to optimise them for each page you write.

Never Duplicate Your Website Content

One of the biggest no-no’s in web content is duplicate content. Avoid it, period. What that means is, never ever publish content on your website that is identical to any other pages on your site. This is especially important to note if you use a content management system or other way of generating content other than manually creating it with a web editor.

Why is duplicate content so bad? Essentially, duplicate content results in link dilution. One of the ways search engines determine your website ranking is based on how many links there are that point to your page (and the quality of the links). If you have identical (duplicate) content on two or more pages of your site, some links will point to one page on your site, while other links may point to another. That will result in a lower ranking for your site than if all links pointed to the same page, a situation in which the links are less “diluted”.

Being Search Engine Friendly Is Not Everything, But…

Follow these basic tips to help you create a search engine friendly website, but bear this in mind: No matter how affable your site is to search engines, that doesn’t automatically translate to high search engine rankings for keyword phrases. But without these steps, you’ll have an extremely hard time getting a good ranking for your site.

The better you get at implementing these tips and creating (or sourcing) SEO content for your site, the better results you’re likely to see in the search engines….resulting in loads of organic website traffic.

What you have just read are very basic, but extremely important parts of search engine optimisation for your website, stay tuned for a more comprehensive guide to SEO coming up very soon.

Thanks for stopping by!
Scotty S. ©2009

Get our complimentary video series and learn How To Make Your Own Website for free now.