Before you even think about starting to add content to your website, there are a few things you need to know about search engine optimization.

1) Make sure your URLs are search engine friendly. You simply cannot have any php/java paramaters, weird characters, or spaces in your URL. For example… if you URL looks like this http://www.yourdomain.com/category.php?id=148&content.htm you are going to need to change it to http://www.youdomain.com/148/content.htm. With an “unclean” URL, chances are that google will not even index your site. If you completely hand code your site and do not use any content mangement scripts, you don’t have to worry about this… however if your site is database driven and uses perl/php or some other type of programming language other than HTML, you will most likely need to fix the URLs. This is called “mod-rewriting”… if you do not know how to set this type of thing up, you will need to hire a programmer or google it and learn it yourself.

2) Make all your page titles unique… I’m talking about in between the <title> tags.. alot of times if you are using a CMS, all of your pages might stay the same title throughout your site. For example, if your site is about basketball … you will need to make each individual page title something like “How to improve your rebounding”, “Michael Jordan Pictures”, etc. You need to make them specific! The reason this is important is because if someone goes to google and searches for “increase verticle leap.” They are 100 times more likely to click on a result titled “How to jump higher” than one titled “Basketball site.” Also, part of the way google ranks sites is based on what is inside the title tag.

3) Make sure every page on your site is linked to! If human visitors have a hard time finding pages on your site, how do you expect the google robots to find them? Another way to make sure google can spider your pages is to set up a google sitemap.

4) Make good use of h1 tags. Aside from page title and link anchor text, google places alot of attention on the h1 tag. Place these at the top of every page just above the content. Make sure they are descriptive, short, and contain keywords. A good idea is to make the text in the h1 tag the same text in your title tag. However, when using the h1 tag, make sure that you do not place it more than once on one page as this could get you penalized on the search engine ranking page.

5) When choosing a domain name, try to always go with a dot-com. Internet users these days are so used to dot-com domain names that even if you tell people that you are yourcompany.net or yourcompany.tv or yourcompany.us (or whatever), they will most likely go to yourcompany.com anyway. Don’t lose out on these visitors!