How to make your website search engine friendly

There are already a lot of tips on the internet how to optimize your site for search engines but before you do this you first have to make sure that search engines can find your website.

On the website www.usarchy.com Ruben Timmerman wrote a nice article about the 10 basic rules to make your site search engine friendly(dutch) . The article is dutch so for my english users I shortly describe his article.

1. No introduction site, like flash intro
2. No (i)frames
3. Every content should also be available as a link
4. No content in Word/PDF etc
5. No navigation in images, Flash or JavaScript
6. No text in images or Flash
7. Use readable URL’s
8. Use clean source code (XHTML, HTML & CSS)
9. Use titles (h1, h2, h3, etc)
10. Every page should be accessible only by 1 URL

Not every point needs a lot of explaining. If there are questions about a point feel free to ask it in your comment.

3. Every content should also be available as a link

If you make a site that is really depending on searching trough content it’s hard for Google to match you with a keyword. That is why you should always put links to the content you have on your website.

Here is a example how yellowpages.com fixed this problem.

The yellowpages.com is specialized in searching for companies but they are still offering some category links. This is to link the yellowpages.com to the content they are providing, but normally they are only providing this trough searching.

7. Use readable URL’s

Try to make every URL of your website as clean as possible. That is not only helpful if you e-mail the URL to someone or someone has to memorize it, it is also better for the search engines.

A example is www.pixmania.co.uk after I choose a country I get this link:

10. Every page should be accessible only by 1 URL

This is pretty simple. If you have the domains “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” and you provide the same content on both domains than the search engine will give you a duplicated content penalty. what will result in a lower page rank.

If there are questions about the other points you can ask it in the comments and I will answer it