Optimising your site for search engines such as google is seen to be a dark art. There’s some things you can do to make your site easily crawled and found by search engines

  1. Put good content on your site.
     Good content is the mainstay of SEO, your site needs original, well written copy and content which has in it the key words relating to your site. You need to make sure this content gets people reading it, and make it content other sites will want to link to. Do not stuff your page full of key words, unrelated or related to your site, it all has to be relevant and not spammy.
  2. Get a good domain with key words in related to your site.
     This isn’t easy if you already have a domain for your site, but if you want to rank higher for ‘widgets’ buy a domain with the name ‘widgets’ in it. Though this isn’t a major factor in getting good search rankings.
  3. Use folders/directory names on your site with relevant keywords.
     Don’t do http://www.example.com/index.php?page=1. You can use Apache’s URL rewriting to do much better. For example http://www.example.com/widgets-I-talk-about/1/ it has key words in, and isn’t spammy.
  4. Make your page titles relevant.
     The title will be shown in the search listing, you need to make this easy to read, and not stuffed with key words. Ideally your titles should be about 10-15 words maximum and again, relevant to your content.
  5. Internal links.
     These are links to your own pages, make sure you actually use proper <a href=”></a> links in your HTML, do not build menus with Javascript as search engines can’t run it.
  6. Meta tags.
     Make sure you use the keywords and description meta tags. Do not stuff these with unrelated keywords and do not repeat too many keywords in each one. Your description is usually what a search engine displays on the search results, but not always. Google will pick what it thinks is a relevant paragraph from the page.
  7. Use Header tags properly.
     These are the H1, H2, H3, H4 tags. They’re hierarchical in HTML4 and XHTML. You should only have one H1, and beneath that H2s for your sub headings, and any other headings below that should be H3, H4, etc depending on the level of headings on your page. These should also be relevant to your content.
  8. Avoid flash for navigation and text content.
    Flash is fine, for multi-media, but avoid it if possible for site navigation, main textual content, etc. Search engines are learning to crawl flash, but they’re in the early stages. If you do use flash, please make an HTML fallback.
  9. Submit a sitemap.
    This doesn’t really help people find your site, but you should submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, it lets you tell Google which pages to crawl as well as Google spidering your site for links.
  10. Use one form of your domain name.
    If you have a wildcard DNS, you’ll find you can get to your site using both http://example.com and http://www.example.com/ pick the one you like most, and then redirect the old one using a 301 Page Moved Permanently to the URL you like. This means you’ll avoid any duplicate content penalties if your site gets linked to in the wrong way. You can also pick the URL you want displayed in Google Webmaster Tools.

This obviously isn’t the end of SEO, there’s a lot more you need to do outside of your own pages, such as building links, social media, networking etc. But it’s a good start!