Over the years we have had numerous enquiries from webmasters and website administrators, asking why are my web pages not ranking in the search engines?  Generally, one of the problems is that they have not built search engine friendly websites.  Below are a few pointers on search optimization to help you ensure that you design search engine friendly websites.

Add Text to Images

It is imperative, when building search engine friendly websites, that you add text to your images.  Understand that the search engine spiders are only able to read text, no images, not text embedded in images, not video, only text.  While Google has the rudimentary ability to scan a flash file, it can only follow basic links and cannot read the file, as it were.

For each media element in your search engine friendly websites, regardless of whether this is an image, video or flash file, you need to describe the media by adding an "alt" tag to each media element.  The search engines cannot read your media element, but through search optimization, they can read the "alt" tag and will add this into there index for your page.

Validate HTML Code

It is important that you validate your html code to ensure that there are no coding errors, I am not talking about spelling mistakes, but the code behind the page and when building search engine friendly websites, I recommend that you run each page through HTML and CSS Validators to ensure there correctness from a search optimization point of view.

Although the search engines don't penalise you for poor code, they rely on the correctness of the code to determine which portions of the page to index.  If there are errors with the code, the search engines might not index the entire page, thereby reducing the probability that the page ranks highly in the search engines results pages.

Create Title Tags

The search engines give extra importance to the text within the "Title" tag, note that this is not the title that you see at the top of the page, but the "Title" tag in the code, behind the page you see.  It is also the text that appears in the Title bar of your browser window.

When doing thier search optimization, many new website administrators just put the site name in the "Title" tag, or leave it blank, when creating search engine friendly websites, it is important that you provide unique titles for each of your pages, ensuring that the title describes the page content.

Use HTML Navigation

Many websites rely entirely on great looking Javascript menus, from the browsers point of view, these work well, but unfortunately, the search engines don't understand Javascript, much as they don't understand Flash, so unless you have text links between pages, the search engines won't find your inner pages.  This will surely be disadvantages, compared to a site that has both Java/Flash links and plain text links in there search optimization structure.

Another important consideration when creating search engine friendly websites is the inclusion of a sitemap.  This will allow both search engines and browsers who do not have Java/Flash installed, to reach each of your inner pages.  The sitemap needs to be accessible from your Home page.

Remove Duplicate Content

You need to ensure that your search engine friendly websites don't have any duplicate content.  Joomla and other blogging and content management systems often provide more than one path to the same content, for example, you could reach article ABC at www.mysite.co.za/articles/abc or you may reach it at www.mysite.co.za/archives/article-acb.  Another example of this is if your site uses session ID's.  Each visitor to your site will have a different session ID taged onto the end of the url, to the search engines, both of these examples would be handled as duplicate content and there importance to the search engines would be diminished.  Try using cookies instead of session ID's, this works better from a search optimization point of view.

Another problem with duplicate content is that the search engines count the number of links pointing to each page, the more links from related pages, the higher the assumed importance of that page.  If you have duplicate pages, there is every chance that some links follow one path, while other links follow a different path, thereby reducing the number of links to either page and minimizing the effects of your search optimization.

Remove Hidden Text

I think most of us realise that hidden text is a waste of time.  I refer to text placed in the HTML of the page that is not visible to the browser.  In the early days of the search optimization, some black-hat SEO consultants used to use hidden text to stuff keywords into the page to try and influence the search engines.  The search engines solution was simple, they don't promote pages that contain hidden text.

Free webhosts are often guilty of running hidden text around thier advertising on your site pages, they do this to influence the type of adverts displayed on your pages.  This could result in your website being penalised through no fault of your own.  If you are serious about your web presence, buy your own domain and deploy your website on a commercial webhosts server.

Your search engine friendly websites will not gaurantee you top placement for your keywords, but it is the first step to your website pages being ranked at all.  Websites that have no search optimization, will usually not rank at all for there given keywords. These tips are essential if you are improving your search engine ranking on Google, Yahoo or any of the other major search engines.