Let’s imagine this situation. You have one of the best designed website on the internet. You simply seem to have everything in place on the website. Great graphics, flash, a superb navigation system, etc. But you are only short of one thing. Traffic!!! Yes, traffic. This traffic is the key to your online business or website’s success. You need these visitors flowing in to your website regularly on a consistent basis. The most popular search engines on the internet are Google, MSN and Yahoo. So it is very important to design your website pages which are optimized for them, so that they will rank your website highly and you will be able to get traffic from them.

The manner in which the major search engines rank your website is through programs called search engine robots or crawlers. These robots crawl the internet and find websites. Then they read and follow all the content on various pages of the website and register everything in their database. So whenever people are searching the internet for information they pull up these listings and present it to them.

There are many things which you need to avoid in order to liked by the search engine robots. First and formost are frames. If your website is in frames, then it is very easy to confuse the search engines. This is because the frameset will contain one main page, and the information keeps on changing in the frames internally. These frames will also annoy your users who will find it difficult to bookmark different pages on your website.

Next in line are flash websites. Try avoiding entire flash websites as much as possible. There is a place for flash elements and flash websites, but do not try to construct a information rich website in flash. These information websites are rich in keywords and if it is presented in flash, then it will be impossible for the search engine robots to see them, since they can only read information in text form in your source code. Hence this can adversely affect your search engine rankings.

Use HTML tags like Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords wisely and on every page of your website. This will help the search robots understand what every pages on your website are all about. This makes the search engine’s job very easy and they will index your pages more often. Also, whenever you add these tags always see to it that you don’t overdo them.

Always use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to design and style your pages. Avoid using tags like “font, pre, bg”, etc. Most of these tags should be declared in the style sheet which should be used throughout the website. In this manner your code will become very compact and clean and will make your website code easy to read and faster to load.

Search engine optimization is an endless task and is not within the bounds of one article. But the aforementioned tips is just my humble attempt to get you started in the right direction.