All of us strive to make our sites as visible in the search engines as possible. What’s the point of creating a hot new site, full of the latest and greatest content if no one can find you? Obviously, there is none. So how do we craft our sites to make them more search engine friendly?

Here are 5 tips that will help.

1. Using Keywords In Your URL - This has a certain search engine benefit, and while there is some debate as to whether it’s a good idea to have a domain separated by dashes, for example my-keyword-rich-site.com, the main point is to try and utilize keywords in your URL if at all possible. There are some exceptions to this, like if you are trying to brand yourself, in which case you might opt for a URL with your name in it. But that’s still a keyword, or will be someday!

2. Proper Keyword Utilization – Making sure you have keywords in certain places on your pages can make a large difference. The first and most important spot is in the title tag of your page itself. This is primarily what Google and the other search engines look to for an initial clue as to what your site is about, and which keyword you are optimizing this page for. Other places to firmly plant your keywords are in header tags (H1, H2) and in the keyword tags, (if you have a blog) and while Google is adamant about the irrelevance of keywords in your keyword meta tags, other search engines still take a peek, so it couldn’t hurt.

3. URLs and Filenames – You’ve seen them: URLs a quarter-mile long filled with an incomprehensible array of letters and numbers. While this may get the user to your page, it does little for any SEO benefit. Make sure that your site architecture includes a keyword strategy that makes use of real titles and words. Eliminate any extraneous words and characters, leaving only a keyword rich URL, even for subfolders.

4. Sound Internal Linking – Make sure there are links to the pages on your site that are available to your visitors. Ensure that you have a working sitemap in place, and that it is current. A Google XML sitemap is perfect for this. Strive to make your site make sense in terms of site hierarchy, with proper categories and sub-categories. A popular way of doing this is by using what is known as a silo technique, where a large category is parent to other sub-categories. Be mindful of the amount of outgoing links you have on your pages, and you may want to employ a no-follow tag, to avoid bleeding page rank.

5. Use Simple Code - If your content is more than simply flash and images, then you may want to make sure you limit the amount of Javascript and Flash you have employed on it. Search engines have a hard time rendering these, and it could make your site unreadable, which would be a tragedy for any rankings you may be hoping for. Use simple code and run it through a code validator for errors, so that all of your content is available for the world to see!

Making your site more search engine friendly isn’t that hard, but could be the difference between being visible or not. Take the time to make it so!