With so many web sites out there nowadays it’s important to ensure that your hit is doing all it can to be noticed.  The best way is to rank highly in search engines (SE). 

keywords, semantic and logical html mark-up + link text and tags, sitemaps, limit page not found, search engine friendly URLs, code:text ration, feeds, meaningful content

1. Keywords

Selecting keywords is a really easy thing to get wrong, to general and your site will struggle to surface and to specific and your site will sink. Think of keywords as phrases that you use frequently in your site.  The more frequent then the more important these words are.  For example, say we have a running web site. “Running” would we a silly keyword because it’s far to general. Words like “cross-country” are much better.  For a web sire like that it would also be silly to leave it geographic words like “Glasgow”.

A few good tools are Google’s Keyword Selection tool (part of adsense) and the keyword optimizer over at SeoChat.com (the top ranked site for the phrase “seo”on Google).

2. Semantic and logical HTML

The idea here is to make the content easier to analyze by a web site crawler.  Also, the page should be logical in structure.  So, an example would be a common structure across all pages that started with a top section, menu, content and a footer.

Also, making use of optional tags like ALT means that a search engine can effectively read unreadable content like images.  Furthermore, make sure each page has a relevant title that is NOT the web site address and starts with the page topic.

There is a lot more information on creating good semantic html on Wikipedia. 

3. Page Not Found

SE hate crawling web sites and to realizing that it’s just a bunch of dead ends. It will note this and it will try avoid re-crawling. So minimize dead links, remove dead pages, add dead URLs to your robot.txt (more about robot.txt).

4. Sitemaps

A very new and exciting feature that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all added to their search engines is the ability for a bot to look for a XML-based sitemap. And the bet thing about it is that they’ve all implemented it the same way! This is a file places inside your root directory that directs a search engine to the files on your web site and informs them of the frequency of change, last updates and a few other things.

You can find out more about sitemaps on the official sitemaps web site or Google sitemaps page.

5. Search Engine Friendly URLs

Always, always, make sure that your URLs make sense. “thing.html” does not inform the search engine that the page is about types of birds. A better choice would be “types-of-birds.html”.

6. Code to Text ration

Fewer lines of code and more content means that your page has more meaning and it therefore more important. Having semantic code helps this.

Conclusion

There are a lot more intricate and detailed optimization techniques that will also help boost your sites position, but the 6 I’ve mention are, without a doubt, the most important.