With a little practice, anyone can build a webpage. But a webpage that search engines love to visit and index -- vital if you expect your site to get traffic -- that's another story. So many, many business websites don't have a clue how to do this. Let me mention two important aspects of building a search engine friendly site:

Your webpages ought to entice search engine spiders or robots to index your site. Each webpage you construct needs to contain the following elements. Note the careful placement of keywords, the search words people would use to find this particular webpage.

• Title -- provocative and descriptive, containing the most important keywords from that webpage, no more than 80 characters. This is what shows up hyperlinked in search engine results, so make people want to click on it.
• Meta tags -- The description meta tag should include one or two sentences (up to about 250 characters) describing the contents of this particular webpage. Work into the sentence the most important keywords and keyphrases that occur on this page. Some search engines will display your description. I still include a meta keywords tag, since Yahoo currently uses it for indexing, though Google doesn't.
• Headlines -- H1, H2, H3 in HTML parlance. Your headline and subheadings should include your important keyword at least once.
• Body text -- The first paragraph of the content of your webpage article or text should contain the main keywords for that page.
• Hyperlink text and filenames -- Search engines believe that the words contained in hyperlinks on your webpage (such as widget) are important, and thus rank them higher. If the filenames contained in the hyperlink URLs contain important keywords (such as widget.html for the filename of your widget order page), so much the better.

Don't emphasise the same keywords on every page. Let the actual content on that page dictate what keywords should stand out. Your goal is not to trick the search engines in some kind of bait-and-switch scam, but to help the search engines recognise and index appropriately the actual content of your webpages. Construct every webpage with search engines in mind and it'll help your rankings. Of course, search engine rankings are heavily influenced by incoming links to your site, but constructing your webpages with an eye to search engines is very important, too.

Navigation systems are built to help actual humans find their way around your website. But these navigation systems had better be designed carefully or the search engines will throw up their hands in disgust, with the result that actual humans will never get to your website.
Search engines need a chain of hypertext links -- starting at your homepage -- that will take them, page by page, to every webpage in your entire site. But let me explain three common navigation design problems that can disrupt search engine indexing of your site:

1. Frames produce a navigation system where the menu on the left scrolls independently of the page content on the right. Unfortunately, frames can wreak havoc with search engines.
   1. Unless you are careful to include < NOFRAMES> tags, search engines may not be able to find the content pages.
   2. Even if search engines do find your content pages, these pages can show up in response to a search engine query all by themselves, without the navigation system and links necessary for a visitor to find the rest of your website. Don't use frames. If your current site has frames, make plans to rebuild the site without them. A menu constructed from SSIs is just as easy to maintain -- even easier, once you learn how to do it.
2. JavaScript and Flash are programming languages that can make very classy, animated menu systems. For example, a menu item might have a drop-down sub-menu that will wow your visitors (you hope). The problem is that if JavaScript and Flash systems replace plain hyperlinks, the search engine may not be able to find the underlying pages. Most search engines have posters on their walls saying, "I don't do Flash." Stubborn creatures, these search engines. One solution: retain your fancy menus, but include hypertext links at the bottom of the page to your sectional pages, with links on your sectional pages to all the subpages in that section. You can also submit a site map webpage to the search engines that contains a link to every page on your site.
3. Dynamically generated webpages, created "on the fly" from a database, are more difficult for search engines to index, since these webpages don't exist in real time. They appear when a visitor clicks on a link. Then the database whirrs and spits out a transient webpage for that visitor and that visitor alone.

Don't use content or catalogue management software that produces long URLs if you can help it. You can get around this in three ways:

1. URL rewriting at the server configuration level,
2. building a set of focused content pages, or
3. paid inclusion submission to search engines. What are the design decisions regarding search engines? A commitment to design
   1. each webpage and
   2. the site navigation system with search engines in mind.