There is no point in building a website unless visitors come in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet are search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Altavista. By designing a search engine friendly site, you improve your chances of ranking higher on search results and obtaining more visitors.

How Search Engines Work

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites for listing in their search result pages. These crawlers follow links to pages, read the content, and record it in a database. This data is then used to match users’ search queries with relevant web pages.

Avoid Using Frames

Frames confuse search engine crawlers, which might abandon your site rather than indexing it properly. Additionally, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark specific pages without complicated scripts, which impacts usability negatively.

Present Text Over Flash or Images

Search engine robots can only read text present in your page’s source code. Important information displayed in Flash movies or images without text alternatives will be invisible to crawlers, adversely impacting your rankings. Always use textual content for key information.

Use Meta Tags Properly

Each page should have relevant meta tags, such as a unique <title> and <meta name="description">, to help search engines understand the content and decide how to index it. Meta tags make a crawler’s job easier and help increase crawl frequency.

Use CSS Instead of Deprecated HTML Tags

Avoid outdated tags like <font> for styling. Instead, use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for design and layout. CSS makes your pages lighter and faster to load, which improves user experience and is favored by search engines.