Search friendly websites

The most important things on your web site are words. Writing for the web and search engines is so much more than writing text which is easy to understand. If the words, phrases and copywriting on your site are carefully chosen, appeal to search-engines and updated often, your ranking and search position can improve enormously. Think about the needs of your audience....

• Who’s visiting this site?
• What does she want to know?
• What does he want to do?

Top tips for Search friendly websites

• Relevant, easily accessible content is very important. Use simple language. The content of your site should be as easy to read and shouldn't use 'jargon'
• Ensure that pages can be indexed by search engines
• Important pages should have permanent web addresses (URLs).
• Avoid using Flash as search engines cannot properly index Flash-based content
• Search engines have trouble indexing pages from sites with frames so try to avoid them
• Content quality is especially important for entry and landing pages such as the homepage. Ensure that these pages contain good keywords
• User created content is very popular with search engines so consider adding content such as comments, blogs and wikis to encourage this
• Heading tags, tell the search engine that some pieces of content are more important than others so use them

Accessibility
Making your site accessible – including those with disabilities is not only good practice but can also improve your search engine listings and make your Web content more accessible to everyone. The main Accessibility guidelines to follow are The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).There are many resources available online to help improve the accessibility - see Wave Webaim a free web accessibility evaluation tool.