There are several ways to build an SEO friendly website. With today's technology, there are simple plugins for ensuring your Blogger, Wordpress or other blog site is automatically built to include many of these components.

If you are planning on hiring an outside party, ensure that they are practicing search engine friendly techniques for creating their custom website designs.

Rules of thumb when building a Search Engine friendly site:

Structure:

1. Build with HTML pages
   
2. No frames!
   
3. Homepage needs text and calls to action near the top
   
4. Homepage must include business address for indexing in local engines
   
5. Include navigation text links on the bottom footer of every page
   
6. Include a “breadcrumb” link trail at the top of each interior page
   (ie home > products > womens > t-shirts ) on large sites with multiple sections and levels.
   
7. Name pages relevantly
   ASP generated pages should not have more than three % signs in the URL string
   
8. Site map page must be easy to find and include a link to every page in website
   
9. No java navigation menus – java rollovers are acceptable. CSS text links are always best.
   
10. Use CSS to eliminate code bloat including formatting elements and text, tables and more!
    This also saves time & money in the future since edits to all similar components of a site will be edited at once through the css file.
    
11. SEO Semantic Coding - This option implements the coding that uses SEO-valued tags to underline the most important parts of the content (H1, H2, etc.).

1. Name images relevantly
   
2. Use keywords when possible
   
3. Add descriptive Alt tags on all images
   
4. Describe each image with caption text above or below
   
5. Don’t make important text phrases into images

1. Content needs to be in text or .pdf format – images or flash movies are not readable
   Note: Word docs while once were not indexable, they are more recently getting indexed but we recommend always creating content pages since they include your site navigation and calls-to-action.
   
2. Link relevant terms within content to relevant pages within the website
   
3. Always add more. Get as much as possible up-front.
   
4. Remember searchers usually search for problems instead of solutions, gear content pages to solve problems.
   
5. Include a page relevant for articles, sharing content or more so that you have accessibility to update a page for link love.
   
6. Search engines love RSS feeds or blogs, include if possible
   
7. Re-read all text from client and seed in keyword phrases if possible. Read aloud and if it sounds repetitive you’re overdoing it. Remember to use different variations of these phrases; ie singular and plural, jargon and layman.

1. Place your 'social candy' icons above the scroll on your homepage so visitors can easily connect with you long term.
   
2. Implement a 'share' feature on all your pages and posts
   
3. Incorporate YouTube videos, Twitterfeeds, and Facebook plug ins so visitors see you interacting in the space and WANT to connect with you.
   
4. Don't forget to link to your review sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Yahoo Local - reviews are extremely important for both SEO and conversions!