This briefing will not guarantee you a top rank for any search engine, but modifications explained here will improve and increase your chances to get your website into the most relevant search listings.

It is important to bear in mind that search algorithms change very often, so this little advice is only about overall guidelines you should follow, the best way to make sure you get an effective and permanent search engine positioning is having valuable information in your web portal, and this information must not only be valuable for spiders, but also for regular users. Relevant contents will turn your website attractive for linking from other relevant websites.

In summary, the goal of your website’s optimization is to increase incoming web traffic for targeted keywords you optimize your website for, and for other relevant keywords search engines will find out themselves.

31% of people over the Internet search two-words keyphrases, 25% search three-word keyphrases and only 19% search one single word when utilizing a search engine

Needless to say, search engine optimization is not about optimizing your website for keyphrases your competitors are too strong, and obtaining good results on this can take a long time and cost a lot of money. You must start the optimization process by optimizing keywords with far less competitors and which can drive the same incoming web traffic to your website.

The keywords you utilize to optimize your website, must be somehow related to your website. To find which of these keywords are also being actively searched by users you can utilize several tools, like KeywordDiscovery and Overture.

While you are creating contents for your website you must avoid the use of generic keywords which are not relevant to your website or have no reason to be included, this is because you do not want your website to attract traffic on those. If you can summarize a keyphrase in one single keyword it is ok to leave it at that, unless you have specific reasons to promote a longer keyphrase (more targeted, less competitors, etc).

You should try to name the URLs and images using targeted keywords, but you must not abuse on them or in the use of punctuation characters (dashes, points, etc.)

For the optimization of URLs you must avoid the use of cryptic names or names using URL parameters (URL query strings) at all costs. On the other hand, using URL rewriting is highly advisable, because it can convert ugly URLs in search engine friendly URLs and still keep most of your code untouched.

Ugly URL: http://www.example.com/about.asp?id=150
Search Engine Friendly URL: http://www.example.com/florida-web-services

One of the highlighted methods for web traffic generation is the creation of structured contents in separate pages. Each page can be optimized for a maximum of three keyphrases, though the exact number depends on the size of contents. Optimal results could be obtained by optimizing each page for one single keyphrase.

You should never publish your website without finishing the optimization, and always check every link (internal or external) to make sure none of them is broken. You must have a sitemap for the optimization to become really effective. A breadcrumb navigation is also good, mainly, for regular users.

Breadcrumb navigation
Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page

We have put toguether some specific guidelines you can use while building your website in the HTML editor of your choice:

Title

It must not be longer than 70 characters according to Google and DMOZ (including spaces).
It must not start with the domain name (can be considered spam).
It must contain the keywords you want to be ranked on.
The character must be capitalized.
It must not be all uppercase.

An example of a nice title: Data Recovery and Hard Drive Repairing Service

Description Meta Tag

Not all search engines check the description meta tag, but it is still an important part of search engine optimization. This tag should not be longer than 100 characters (Google can read up to 200), but most importantly, it should actually describe each page effectively.

Keywords Meta Tag

It should not be longer than 300 characters.
It should only utilize keywords present in the website contents, using keywords not present in the website contents could be penalized.
It must be all lowercase.
You can use keywords or keyphrases, but you must separate each keyword/keyphrase with a comma.
Do not repeat a keyword/keyphrase or overload the tag with too many variations of the same keyword/keyphrase. That will surely be considered spam.

Website Contents

Targeted keywords should be included inside important tags, like H1, H2, H3 and strong. Search engines will assign a higher weight to those.
Targeted keywords at the start of a paragraph are usually assigned a higher weight than keywords near the end of a paragraph.
Never abuse of keyword density, do not repeat a keyword/keyphrase over and over, since this is usually considered keyword spamming. Though there is no certain limit for repeating a keyword/keyphrase you should try to keep the density to a maximum of 15% of contents.
You should use targeted keywords for the link text on internal or external links. Never use “click here” or other aberrations for link text (unless you really do not care about the target page).
Multimedia: Try to keep image sizes to a minimum, image search engines have size and timeout limits. Search engines will either not parse flash files, or assign a very low weight to what they extract from them. A full-flash website is highly discouraged.
Alt Text: You can use alt text not only for images, but also for links and media objects. This information is relevant to search engines. Images have the alt attribute, links have the title attribute for the same purpose.

Always check the validity of your code against the w3c validator. This will at least give you the certainty that search engines can parse and read your HTML code properly. Using Flash, Javascript and AJAX is not discouraged, but you have to take precautions if you implement one of these technologies in your website.