There are several things that you can do to make your site "friendly" to the search engines, especially Google.

First of all, make effective use of your page's title Meta Tag. Choose a title that reflects your business and includes 2 or 3 of your primary keywords. For example, the title of our site is: "Custom website design for small business in London. Rural Web Design"

This title has 5 of our most important keywords in it: Custom - Website - Design - London and Business .

Another very important Meta Tag is the description The description tag shouldn't contain just a list of key words. It should be a logical sentence that contains your keywords. Again, we'll use our description as an example: "Custom web site design and marketing from Rural Web Design in Cumbria"

This description contains our primary keywords yet it reads like a coherent sentence.

In order to make it very easy for the search engine spiders to crawl your site, if possible place links to all of your pages on your home page as well as every other page on your site. Also create a Site Map page and link to it directly from your home page. On your Site Map page place links to every other page in your website. This guarantees that every page on your website can be reached with a maximum of two mouse clicks or "link follows" by the spiders.

Near the top of your page, you should use your primary keywords in an H1 header tag. Google gives extra weight to text located within header tags when computing PR. Also use a couple of H2 tags on your page because they count as well (although not as much as the H1.

You can use ALT tags to describe your photos. If you can use a keyword or two in your ALT tag that is even better, but be careful here that your ALT tag accurately describes the photo or Google may consider it to be SPAM which of course is not good.

Validate Your HTML Code. While the search engines don't care whether your HTML code is error-free, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index. If your HTML code contains errors, it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine's database. The errors, while undetectable in a web browser, may lead the search engine software to think that some of the text on your page is part of the HTML formatting information rather than your site's content. As a result, the search engine may ignore that text, and your web page will not be shown in its results page.

Creating a search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that you will get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a necessary first step if you want to rank anywhere near the first few pages of the search engine results. A site that is not search engine ready may not even appear in the results for any query. The tips in this article are the pre-requisites for any website aspiring the top positions in Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines.