SEO friendly website.

Step by step I would like to explain how to build and organize SEO friendly website.

- MetaTags. Recommended title length should be less than 150 chars, description length is less than 200 characters, keywords length is between 300 and 500 characters.

- Keywords in MetaTags. Your keywords should tell spiders what your website exactly about. If you have real estate website, your keywords should look like: real estate, home sales, house sale…

- Category links. Use header and sidebar to place most important links. It is a big mistake when you keep important links in the footer. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask… spiders don’t give enough value to pages which linked from the bottom of the website.

- Content. Place the most important phrases on top of your page. Make headlines and page titles larger than other content.

- Links. On a single page don’t place more than internal 100 links and more than 50 links if you link other sites.

- Destination of important content. Most important pages shouldn’t be far away from homepage. If you want good ranking for pages with rich content, you should keep them only 1-2 clicks away from the homepage. In cases when it is impossible, make sure that these pages got some backlinks from other sites. Internal links could help to increase importance for all pages.

- Title name. Title name should always be bold and bigger than other text on the page. It is good when your title appear in MetaTags.

- Duplicate content. If your pages repeat each other use robots.txt to remove pages with similar content from search engines.

- RSS feeds. Remove RSS feed page from search engine index (robots.txt). Don’t show whole content in your feed, use only 50-100 characters. Many social networks read your feed and show duplicate content on their pages.

- Pages you should have. It is very important to have sitemap, privacy, about, and contact pages.

- Canonization issues. It is when the same page has different urls like /index.html , http://www… , http://…

- Graphic problems.  Search engines can’t recognize flash or messages which hidden in the pictures. JavaScript also is a big problem for search engines to read. Double check your Yahoo, Google cache pages and look what spiders see when they visit your site.

- Intro and welcome pages. I always recommend to get rid of intro pages which have nothing, but some fancy design, simple message, and link to your actual website. Intro page reduces value of every other page on a website.

- Name all pictures. Google and Yahoo picture search is the same powerful tool for traffic as regular search. Ad tags to name your pictures and use some text as your pictures description.

- URL issues. Make your URL is short and understandable. Search engines rank sites better if your URL represents your content. For example: …/my-page-topic/ and ../my-page-topic.html will rank better than …/topic=0234.php.