Building Search Engine Friendly Pages for your web site

The whole point of building a website is that you have plenty of visitors to view your content. The main source of traffic for most sites are the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. By making your website search engine friendly, you will be able to achieve a higher page ranking, and ultimately get more visitors.  Search engines use some software called a crawler to scan the content of web sites, making notes on the strength of content (depending on things like keywords). Complex algorithms are used to determine the page rank for each page in a site, and the relevance to certain keywords.  The exact nature of these algorithms are never divulged to the public, but certain aspects can be determined from their behaviour (There are plenty of websites that will go into detail on the main requirements of the google search engine, among others). It is really important that your keywords are presented on the site in a clear, software readable format. Whatever you do, don't put all of your page text in flash movies, or images - search engines cannot read their content.  However, it is important that all images have their ALT tag set, and if possible , make the file name meaningful (guacamolerecipe.jpg  rather than guac8773.jpg).  Whatever you do, don't keyword stuff your page -  crawlers detect overly high concentrations of keywords, and will downgrade you, or even black mark your whole site (you wont appear on their searches at all).  Some unscrupulous web masters used to put keywords on the page, in the same colour as the background - this meant the user couldn't see it, but crawlers would still read the text. Crawlers are too sophisticated to be fooled by this sort of nonsense any more, so don't even think about it. I have found that the most important thing you can do to improve google search engine rank is to put your relevant keywords in the page title tag, and again in the H1 tags. Make sure your page description meta tag has relevant text in it (even if you just use the first paragraph from the page text), and try to use your keywords a few times within the page text to reinforce the heading and title tags. Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently. The main point more than anything, is that your web pages should contain original, high quality content. It's fine to plagiarise content, if it's in the form of a reference, or it's a relevant news item, but using duplicate content will get you nowhere in the search rankings. For larger sites, it can be really important to submit a site map, to make sure that the crawlers can easily index your whole site.  There are quite a few website generators around, but I find that most of them have a limit of 5000 entries (no good for a something like my cookery site (world wide kitchen) with 20000 recipes. Try to use CSS for layout, and for all styles. Many of the HTML style tags are deprecated (width,height etc.). Page loading times can be improved by using CSS, as your HTML with be lighter.