Creating a website is an easy job, but if you want your site to be popular and visited, you must be aware of some SEO tips. Perhaps everyone that has tried to optimize a website for search engines has heard a lot of tips, but which are the most important? There are different opinions but we have tried to gather and refine all of them to create a true list of the top ten most important tips. They are ordered not by importance but following the steps of creating website.

Remember that the best tip is to create the site for the user, not for search engines - this is the only way it will do well in search engines as well. We have all been to sites that "don't make much sense" as a result of webmasters targeting keywords that they have trouble placing into readable text. You can have thousands of web site visitors each day, but it is useless traffic when they exit your page out of frustration, and they may never return.


Uptime

This is vitally important because your site needs to be up and available each time a search engine spider crawls across it. If the server is down, then the website cannot be reached. So you have to make sure that the uptime of your site is as high as possible. Choose wisely your web services provider and make sure that it guarantees maximum uptime. There are providers that offer an uptime of 99,9% or higher. Search engines (and users) also don’t like slow loading web sites. That’s another thing you have to take care of because sometimes slow loading means “not working” for the search engine.


Choose Good Domain Name

Domain name must be descriptive, but not too long, so users can remember it. Your job is to find the balance between these two things and the best way to do that is to pick the right words for the name. It has to represent what the website is about and also has to be clear and understandable for users. The benefits of having keywords in a domain name are quite noticeable. Also stick either to http://www.mydomain.com or http://mydomain.com. Some search engines may decide these are different websites. Using sub domains is completely irrelevant to the site because this way you split it and create two web sites. Do that only if you are sure you want to make two completely different sections of the site – like http://blog.mydomain.com.


Speed

The website must be as fast as possible! There are a variety of reasons why pages can load slowly, it may either be your web server, poorly coded server side code like php or client side code like javascript which can slow or even stop your page from loading. If loading takes more than 5 seconds, then you lose visitors - both real and search engine bots. On the first place you must reduce the size of the page so it can load faster. Keep it no more than 50K for the html and not more than 200K for images. If your website needs more images, use tools to compress them. Caching is also very helpful when you want to increase the speed of loading, so use it as much as possible. Use also gzip and other web server features that make the pages load faster.
Page Names and Directories

The very name of the page must be as descriptive as possible. Using keywords in the name of a HTML page file has a positive effect on its search result position. Always divide them with dashes. Stick to html extensions (using URL rewriting engines is a good idea), and name the pages descriptive and rich in keywords, but no more than 2-3 so they don’t become too long and confusing. Also you can use appropriately named directories (like \products_category\product_name.html), but be careful – no more than 2-3 directories deep. GET parameters (the ones that are after the extension - ?param=value&param=value) can be very useful but when they become too many, they confuse search engines. Use them only if it is really necessary.

Navigation

It is quite important not only for visitors but also for search engines. Good navigation helps their indexing robots or "spiders", and of course  - it’s much easier for the visitor to find what he’s loking for. Place important links (home, contact, sitemap, etc) both in top and bottom of the page in order to be easily accessed. Link all of the pages in a way that allows one page to be reachable from another in no more than 3 steps. Do not use javascript links or flash links – some engines do not recognize them, and some people don’t see them, because they have disabled javascript or flash. Also these links may lead to errors in some browsers. Stick to the good old anchor tags because search engines have started to attach a lot of importance to the anchor text in them. Also be careful for broken links. Use sitemap pages and custom “error 404” pages. It’s a nice trick to place a small version of the sitemap on the 404 page. This way even if the user reaches it (due to broken link for example) he may not leave it immediately.

Design

Must be as simple as possible. You spend on a page you have reached from a search engine no more than a few seconds – after that you know if it’s relevant to your search. So try creating a design that presents the content of the page in this few seconds as well as possible. The user must understand if this is the page he’s been looking for, or else he may skip it even though it contained the info he was searching for. Do not try to do something fancy if it will do no good for the user. When creating the design consider the fact that users prefer sites they can easily use – the menus must be in the top (or at the left), important links must be duplicated in the bottom of the page. The fonts of the important parts of the page (titles for example) must be bigger, bolder and more noticeable than the less important text.

Meta Tags, Description, Title

It is important to add them. Most search engines give little to no relevance to some of these, however, since no one really knows how they are factored by each engine, they are still important steps in optimizing any web site. For example, Google say they’ll stop analyzing the meta tags, but usually it’s the description meta tag content they display in the results. All meta tags and titles must be no more than 200 chars (even less) and must contain relevant keywords that are searched often by users. Don’t repeat all the keywords over and over everywhere - that doesn’t help much. Make sure you target "phrases" rather than single keywords. Use the robots meta tag too.


HTML Elements

Use heading tags for the titles and paragraph tags for the text to separate the different topics. Create the navigation menu using standard HTML elements like unordered lists and anchors. This makes the links easily discoverable by search engine spiders, helping ensure that as much of your site is crawled as possible. Remember – search engine crawlers see the page without the css applied! Always check the site with browsers like Lynx or something else, with disabled css and javascript. This way you’ll get good idea of what the crawlers actually see. Try to write valid HTML and avoid using frames. This way the search engines will analyze pages easier and the website will do better in different browsers.


Title and Alt Properties

Place them everywhere. Use the alt property in the image tag to describe what an image is showing. Use a title property on every link to describe what that link will do or where it will take you. That way crawlers will know what’s the page or the image they point about. Using alt and title properties will certainly give a higher ranking of your web site. Although different browsers treat them differently, they are given about the same weight by search engines. Remember to place the same title of links that point to the same page (and the same alt for an image that is placed in a few places of the page). Having two links on one page, pointing to the same location, but with different titles tells the crawler you may be trying to cheat.

Text Content

The text in the web site must be relevant and rich in keywords. The best SEO results are observed when a keyword phrase is used several times in the text with all keywords in the phrase arranged in exactly the same order. Try to have as much content as possible (at least more that the code) and be sure that you update it often. A page consisting of just a few sentences is less likely to get to the top of a search engine list. Search engines favor sites that have a high information content. The text must be ordered in paragraphs and well formatted. Use bold and italic for words and sentences that are relevant to the content of the page, because that’s what the user first sees when he enters the page.