Creating Search Engine Friendly Websites:

The most important factor in making your website "search-engine friendly" is the use of a clear website navigation system.

A logical navigation structure helps your users, and the SE's crawl through your site and find your pages. Try to use a "shallow" navigation system; no page should be more than three clicks from the homepage.

If you want to ask for independent opinions of your website structure and usability, join our SEO forum and post your URL there.

Other tips to make you site more search engine friendly:

1. A plain text link with a keyword phrase works best for the search engines, but choose the text carefully, ie use "Blue Widgets page" and not "Index.". If you are using image or banner links, then be sure to use the "alt" text tag with an appropriate keyword phrase.
   
   
2. Cross-link important pages throughout the site. Some of your key product or index pages should be linked to throughout your site. This helps promote the "importance" of the pages, and ensures that these key pages will be crawled and indexed by the search engine robot visitors more frequently.
   
   
3. Avoid linking with javascript. This can't be stressed enough. Search engine spiders can read text in links, but can't necessarily read javascript. If you must use javascript navigation, then be sure to place the same links as text links in a footer at the bottom of the page.
   
   
4. Use a sitemap to help the SE's navigate through your site, and submit it to Google andYahoo. There are many software and web tools to help you create a sitemap automatically, and you can ask about these in our SEO Forum.