In a bid to provide quality websites to our clients we started to look for various ways to make websites code Search Engine Friendly.

Here are some tips on how to make a website be search-engine friendly:

1] Validation of HTML and CSS Code:
One of the main reasons why a website needs to validate its HTML and CSS Code is for its search-engine visibility. Every web page should comply with the standard set by the W3 Consortium, an organization that issues the HTML standards to ensure that it’s free of errors.

While search engines don’t care if the HTML code is free from errors, they depend on the precision of the code to determine which portions of a webpage should be indexed. Basically, if a website has errors on its code, it’s possible that some portions of a web page can only be included in the search engine’s database. The unseen errors in a web browser may confuse the search engine software to think that they are just a part of the HTML formatting information rather than a site’s content. This may lead search engine to ignore that text and that web page will not be displayed in search engine result page.

2. Proper Navigation and Structure of Links & sitemap
Having a proper navigation of links is also an important. As much as possible, all inner pages should be no more than three clicks away from its home page so that search engines will easily crawl these subpages and spider the information they are looking for.

Creating a sitemap is also a significant part of SEO to easily index and crawl all its inner pages. This does not just help visitors to find the pages they need but also help search bots to boost the crawling speed of documents at a website. So it’s crucial to ensure that the sitemap has no broken links so that all the site’s pages will be accessible and visible to search engines.

3. Creating Relevant Title Tags
Title Tags are one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization. These tags are those non-visible text in the HTML Code that are displayed in the title bar or browser. The information inside these tags are first seen by search engine spiders and used as part of their algorithm to determine what the webpage is all about.

4. Adding Keywords to Alt Tags
Search engines can’t able to read images so it’s needed to always put some keywords or description on the alt tags. The text on the alt tags are recognizable by search engines so adding some brief descriptions on alt tags will help them know what the images are all about.

5] Less code, clean Code more content
Who would not like a “clean” code? Even people gets dizzy in looking on a “messy” code and so as to crawlers. It is recommended to use another file for formatting and just “call” your CSS file when needed. That way, crawlers can scan your codes and find your keywords on the content faster.

6] No Hidden Link or Text
The most common way on hiding a link or a text is by using a font color similar to the background color. If found to be doing this, search engines will penalize your site and your rankings will drastically affected.

7] No Cloaking Mechanisms
Never serve a unique, optimized page for the search engines and serve a completely different page to real users. This will risk your site on being penalized or worst being banned.

8] Eliminate Apparent Content Duplication

By duplicate content, I mean pages on your website that are identical to other pages on your site. If you manually create your website using a web editor, this will probably never happen. However, some of the automated services mentioned earlier create alternate routes to the same article. For example, a content management system or blogging software may duplicate the same article you wrote under two different URLs, such as www.example.com/archive/article-name.html and www.example.com/2007/01/05/article-name.html. Another manifestation of this is when your software adds a session id to the URL. Since every visitor receives a different session ID, he/she will link to your page using a different URL.

9] Google Sitemap.

It’s worth creating this XML (http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) file if you have not already, as it can lead to a larger and more enticing search result for your site’s pages in Google. If you already have a Google Sitemap, be sure to update URLs, priorities, and modified dates so it is accurate after re-launch of your website.