There is an ethic to creating a search engine friendly site. It is best understood from the search engines perspective. What is the search engines primary concern? The primary concern for the engine is to return the most relevant information to the users query. To do so, the engine is concerned with a few key factors: Google’s mission statement is, ’to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

In order to accomplish this Google, and other leading search engines such as MSN and Yahoo, have developed algorithms that help determine three important criteria about every site.
• Can they determine what the page or site is about? Is it consistent with the title of the site?

• Does the site offer quality information? Is it presented with appropriate organization and semantics?

• Does the site offer unique information or is it trying to sell a product?

How do these spiders determine the content and quality of your site? Here is a hot list of the top elements.

Title tags must represent the content of the page. The title tag is the first indication a spider receives to decide what the content of the page is going to be. This is going to be the broadest representation of the content. Using a book as an example, the title tags would be the equivalent to the name of the book. The title tag has been and probably will always be one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. In fact, fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings.

• Your code matters to search engines. It needs to be clean, semantically correct, and unique. Use wikipedia as an example: minimal design features, no flash, custom CMS and loads of [quality] content. When the spiders scan a page to index they do not understand heavy code such as flash and cold fusion, thus making the site less likely to be indexed by the spiders. A clean code such as PHP allows the spiders to get through the code quickly and move onto the content.

Header tags are HTML tags that help outline a web page or draw attention to important information. Keywords located inside header tags can provide a rankings boost in the search engines. Keywords in header tags are much like the headlines on a newspaper. Header tags are similar to your title tag in that it must represent the content of the page. Using Header tags correctly tells the search engine what words are important in the context of your page.

The Sitemaps Protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. By submitting Sitemaps to a search engine a webmaster is only helping that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site(s). Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked by a search engine.

Linking, from an SEO perspective, is essentially having users tell other users that “this is worth reading”. Google’ takes into account the popularity of content based on how many people/ sites are linking to it. There are several categories of linking that are important [and deadly if executed poorly] to the search engine friendliness of a site.

Inbound one-way back links are when someone from another site links to your site form their site or blog.

Outbound links are when you link to another site from yours.

Internal links are the links on a page of your site that link to another page on the site.

- Dynamic links are from dynamically generated sites like blogs or forums.

Static links are from a static HTML page.