Developing a Search Engine Friendly Website
First and foremost when developing a website be sure that all the information is consistent with the services you offer or the point you are trying to get across. When thinking about the content of your website keep in mind that you want to use 5% - 7% keywords that you would like indexed. Any more than 7% can be logged as spamming of keywords and will hurt your search engine optimization efforts as opposed to helping. Unlike the past listing keywords within the site will not help you. Another important key is being sure that your images throughout the website have alt tags with a description of that image. Search engines can't see pictures therefore they rely on your alt tags for the keywords describing it. Content that changes often keeps a search engine crawling your website regularly and should be implemented when at all possible.
When possible avoid the use of flash unless you have a non-flash version that can be indexed. Flash is SEO suicide and makes SEO impossible as search engines can't see it and don't like it. Headings should be used to describe content throughout your website along with bold and strong words to let engines know that this is an important point to keep in mind. Any links that are within your site should never be broken meaning they should always navigate the user somewhere. If for any reason you have a link that has nowhere to go use a # to direct it to the current page. Any outbound links or links going to another website should have the no-follow tag so that search engines don't leave your website.
Inbound links are the best way to generate website ranking and outbound links will hurt your overall rank. Please keep in mind that when generating inbound links or links to your website from other websites that you want to focus on other websites with a Page rank or relatively high Alexa ranks. While any links to your website will help the ones that come from high ranked websites will increase your ranking faster than those without. Most of your links from other websites should when possible be from a page that has something to do with the service you offer or at least the same industry. Outbound links again should always have a no-follow tag added to them to be sure search engines don't leave your website thinking that the other website has more relevant information that your own.
