Heres a list of five search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that I try to follow while building, and optimizing my websites.  In no particular order…

1.  Use W3C Valid Code

W3C valid code is code that meets web standards, as determined by the World Wide Web Consortium.  There is a lot of debate about whether or not W3C valid code really matters, especially since most top sites in the world don’t come close to validating by W3C standards. Heck, even google.com has 66 errors and 8 warnings.

I think it matters for a couple of reasons:

• Search engines have to be able to read your content to know what it is you’re talking about.  If you’re page is filled with ugly, incomprehensible markup the search engine’s web crawlers are bound to miss some (or even all) of your content.
• If you bought a book that was filled with grammatical errors and misspelled words what would you think of the author?  Give yourself credibility by coming off as a professional.

2.  Who links to your site?

Its pretty well known in the SEO world that having incoming links from other websites, to your website helps your rankings.  There are a lot of link exchange programs out there that will link to your website, just as long as you link to their website.  Hence the term “link exchange”.  I think there are pros and cons to link exchanges.

Pros:

• Your name is out on the web in other places than your own website.  People will see your site and will (eventually) click to see what you’re about.
• The web crawlers will stumble upon your link on other websites and end up going to it.

Cons:

• I think that sites that are dedicated to nothing but link exchanging aren’t worth much in the eyes of web crawlers.  If Google’s web crawler sees your site linked to by a website that does nothing but link to other websites, why would it think highly of your site?  On top of that, they see that you are linking to the same site that is linking to you.  Google is smart, and will know that you’ve obviously just traded links.
• Google and other web crawlers do put websites on a ‘blacklist’.  If you’ve traded links with a known website on a blacklist it definitely won’t help you.  It may even hurt you.  You’ve then wasted time not choosing wisely who you link exchange with, and possibly even hurt your page rank.

3.  Update the files in your site often.

Pretty much every file in your website has a ‘date modified’ attribute.  That attribute can be seen by web crawlers.  If the Google web crawler is cruising through the world wide web at the speed of light and stumbles upon (or even better yet, goes searching for) many pages of your website and sees that you are giving quality content that is often up-to-date it only makes sense that it will recognize this, and come back to see what you have to offer in the upcoming days, weeks, or months.  If your site hasn’t been updated since Al Gore invented the internet, then your content sure doesn’t seem of value.

4.  Name folders, images, and files things that are easily understood by robots.

Whenever possible, choose search engine friendly naming conventions.  If you’ve got an image of an apple, give it the name ‘apple’ followed by its extension.  If you’ve got a folder that houses information related to business cards, name it ‘business-cards’.  Google will even tell you to use the hyphen to break words apart when naming folders or files.  Make it easy on the search engines and let them find your content as quickly and efficiently as possible.

5.  SUBMIT YOUR CONTENT TO SEARCH ENGINES!

If you think that just building a website with worthwhile content is enough to keep the web traffic flowing, you are a bit mistaken.  Sometimes it takes more than a good website to bring in the hits.  If you’ve got a website and you want people to know about it, submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and everywhere else that you can!  If you’re looking to build an XML sitemap you can do it for FREE at a number of sites.  I use XML-Sitemaps.com, but there are dozens out - just search XML Sitemaps on Google.  And no - I have absolutely nothing to do with XML-Sitemaps.com, I just think its the best XML sitemap generator I’ve found.  If you know of a better one, please let me know so I can use it too!

This concludes my list of 5 things to optimize a website.  I’ve got probably another 1/2 dozen techniques I use, but I’ll get to them in another post.