Every Webmaster should be aware that capturing Search Engine traffic is one of the key agenda on their priority list. Although there are now many Search Engine Optimizers who can do a clean job for a reasonable price, why not do it yourself and make use of the additional budget for other web site promotion channels?



This article focuses on the five most important methods to make sure any site is well prepared for the Search Engine indexing.

The first method is to ensure that your site does not require any password to log in if you want the content to be indexed in the Search Engine index. Search Engine bots are unable to view any content that needs authentication. Therefore, it is always essential to allow a page to be generally accessed if you want the content to be displayed in the search engine.

Cleaning the web pages URLs is also an important task as the bots will ignore those with session ids. Session ids are best to be avoided if you want the specific content to be indexed by the search engines. Although the bots are not so strict on dynamic URLs, it is advisable to keep these URLs short. Refer to the Google Webmaster Guidelines if you want more information on this issue.

The next useful method is to utilize pure text links as your internal site navigation. To increase the number of overall indexed pages in a site, it is strongly recommended to only use text links to point from pages to pages. Some web sites use powerful JavaScript or Flash plug-ins for internal linking and often find themselves in difficulty finding their pages in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Improving a page's ranking often means amending the title of the page. It is a common mistake in every web sites that the titles are cramped with tons of keywords. This is not a good practice as Search Engine will not give a good weighing to all the keywords. Therefore, the title description of a page has to be unique and describes the page's content, for best results.

The last important method is to keep it simple. For search engine indexing, a simple site without much complexity will facilitate the indexing. An excellent way is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for the designing of a site. Using CSS will not only reduce the indexing time but will also improve the overall maintainability of a site.