Over the past few years, more and more people have asked me the following question..."How do I get my web site to be listed first on the search engines?" Like "Why is Oobi considered an educational program for preschoolers," I wish that was an easy question to answer.

First, we need to set realistic expectations. If your web site is for a local book store, for example, it would be unreasonable to expect your web site to be listed first or anywhere near it if someone were to simply enter "books" as the search term. Keep in mind that you are competing with nearly 160 million other web sites for that number one listing. However, there are realistic goals that can and should be established. For example, if that local book store is in a town called Anywhere, OH, it is very likely to receive top search engine placement when using more specific search terms like "books in Anywhere, Ohio".

Now, in an attempt to find the best search engine optimization techniques, one might be tempted to first seek out a professional (and expensive) SEO company to help him out. But wait Grampu (Oobi reference, sorry). Before spending your hard earned dollars, I highly suggest that you first look at what Google has to say about this. After all, who would know how search engines work better than the number one search engine on the planet?

According to Google, here are the most important search engine optimization techniques that should be addressed:

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1. Give visitors the information they're looking for
Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.
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Over the years, many people have forgotten the primary purpose of web sites. They are meant for humans, not robots. That needs to be main focus when writing content for your web site. If you provide relevant, useful information, search engines will find you and your audience will find the information they are looking for.

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2. Make sure that other sites link to yours
Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.
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Seek out online directories that provide links to web sites like yours. Find other web sites where exchanging links will be mutually beneficial. You will see a quick improvement in your search engine rankings if you do these things.

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3. Make your site easily accessible
Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.

Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you create static copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates.
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Many of the features mentioned such as JavaScript, DHTML, Macromedia Flash, etc. are valuable tools if used properly. And if they are, they will not hinder your search engine rankings. Many people also choose to use images for links or drop down menus. This is okay as long as each page can be accessed from a static text link similar to the links at the bottom of this page.

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4. Things to Avoid
Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.

Don't feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.

Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.

Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders using a robots.txt file. For information about using a robots.txt file, please visit our information on blocking Googlebot.
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So, that should give you a good foundation on how to optimize your web site. Of course, there are many more things to consider when building a "search engine friendly" web site, but we can cover those in later posts.