There is a lot of buzz about search engine optimization (SEO). A cottage industry has grown just to address this need. It is certainly important for some companies' web sites to rank high on search engines, but SEO is not as mysterious as some claim.

A fundamental truth is search engines rank sites on content and traffic. Think about it. The logical way to rank search results is to have the most popular site with the most relevant content be first. Over the past several years various techniques have been devised to take advantage of search engine algorithms, but as soon as a pattern becomes prevalent the search engines change their algorithms. Tricking search engines is like timing the stock market -- a gamble, or at best a short term win. I am a proponent of a long-term strategy.

Common Sense SEO

• The title of the page (text displayed in the top of the browser frame) should be descriptive and contain keywords.
  
  
• Use "keyword" and "description" metatags.
  
  
• Have good content on your homepage; content is copy contained in HTML mark-up. Copy displayed in images and Flash is not read by search engines. If you use images that contain important text such as navigation hyperlinks, page titles, and callouts, include the text in "alt" or "title" attributes for that tag. Having a Flashing into/splash page will have no readable content.
  
  
• Good, clean mark-up helps search engine spiders find the content. Using CSS and standards compliant techniques makes for good SEO.
  
  
• Use hyperlinks in the copy to other pages in your site. The easier it is for a human to find information the easier it is for search engines to do so too.
  
  
• Have well written copy that thoroughly describes the services or products. Make sure the copy contains keywords and avoid pronouns or references to terms in informal ways. If a term has an acronym, use that in addition to the full term.
  
  
• If you have copy in Flash, repeat the copy in div tags in the page mark-up and set the "visible" attribute to "hidden". This gets the copy accessible to search engines.
  
  
• Create a site map.
  
  
• Add a glossary of technical terms and general facts pages if applicable.
  
  
• Drive traffic to your site by marketing your site via traditional means: advertising, brochures, direct mail, press releases and e-mails.
  
  
• Link to industry sites and other sites that are managed by clients, vendors, affiliates and divisions.
  
  
• Time is on your side. The longer your site is on the web with the same domain name, pages and content, the more of a chance it has to be found and indexed by search engines.
  

These unsophisticated guidelines will go a long way to improve the search engine friendliness of your site.