Gavin presents his top tips for making a search engine friendly website. These tips are aimed at the SEO, IT team or Webmaster, although the information contained applies to all.

SEM Top Tips in Web Design

1. Set a good foundation with a style sheet. A good style sheet works as a template for the design of the whole site and implemements a consistent style.
2. Use divs instead of tables. There is a temptation to use tables for exact positioning of text and images, and in doing this you may run the risk of making nested tables which search engines cannot spider.
3. All Java and CSS files should be called from an external file. Search engines do not like alot of code on a page and much prefer to read copy.
4. Alt tag on images. If you have a site which will contain many images, give the images alt tags, in doing this you are providing search engines with an explanation into what the images represent.
5. Be cautious of flash. Avoid using flash as links within the site as search engines cannot direct users into flash from a search query. However using flash in moderation will give a website pizazz and be very attractive to the user.
6. Include a sitemap. Provoiding a hierarchal sitemap in your site enables the search engines to spider every link and all pages within your website. The site should be built with a logical link structure, every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
7. Create good, information rich content. Use keyword research to help analyse what terms you want to target and write content which clearly describes what the site offers. Up to 300 words per page is sufficient.
8. Make sure that all Meta and Title tags are descriptive, relevant and accurate.
9. Control the volume of links. On each given page keep the links to a reasonable number prefererably under 100.
10. The website should validate. If the site doesn't validate, it will draw attention to broken links or wrong code which will prove helpful. Mistakes in code could be an obstacle for search engines spidering the site. To check if the website validates: http://validator.w3.org/

Remember: SEO doesn't limit design.

Search Engine Marketing top tips part 1 recorded live for CIMA at the Hilton Cobham (UK) January 2008:

Search Engine Marketing top tips part 2:

and here is the final part with Q & A's

Weboptimiser specialise in providing seo and ppc marketing services for clients around the World.