The most important aspect of a website’s search position (beyond of course its content – which is and should be considered the most important) is its search engine friendly-ness.

Here are a few ways to make sure your website is search engine friendly:

1. Provide meaningful content. This is by far the most important factor. No matter how well formatted your website is, without meaningful cohesive content, no one will link to it or view it, and inbound links are very important for successful SEO. I found this little gem on highrankings.com: Without any links at all pointing towards your site not only will it not rank very well, but it won’t even stay in the index. Tis the way of the web. The search engines expect people to link to things those people find to be of value. So if no one ever links to your site they make the (correct) assumption that it has no value to their users. – Randy. Please keep in mind that only relevant links really improve your rankings, and therefore link farms and paid links, etc are generally a bad idea.
2. Check for broken links. These not only appear unprofessional to web visitors, they hamper a search engines ability to index your site. There are many commercial programs which can automatically and periodically check your site. Free web services exist as well: http://validator.w3.org/checklink
3. Make sure your HTML/XMTL and CSS is standards compliant. This helps solve a lot of display issues when visitors with alternative (non-Internet Explorer) browsers view your website. It also ensures search engine crawlers will be able to properly decode your site for their indexes. For HTML validation see: ” target=”_blank”>http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
4. Analyze your pages for speed and performance. This is more for search engines than for users with slow internet connections. The faster a search engine can spider through your site, the more pages and more often they can index your content. Check out analyzers like this one:
   http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
5. Make good use of HTML structural elements. This means having descriptive title meta tags that match your page content, using heading tags (h1, h2, h3) for important title text on the page, keeping stylistic elements in a separate CSS file, using alt tags for images, among other things. This helps search engines understand the overall intentions of your content, and therefore index it better, bringing more relevant results to its users.
6. Create a sitemap. This lets search engines know what pages are available for indexing, and can help get new pages indexed quicker. The standard major search engines use is sitemaps.org
7. Track your progress and results. This will help you adapt your content to what your visitors are attracted to your site for. Google Analytics is a great tool: http://www.google.com/analytics/. Simply add a small javascript tag to your sites pages and you will have instant access to information such as what your viewer audience is like and what they are interested in on your site. It is a very powerful tool, and even more powerful when you trend results over several months, so get started right away!
8. Keep up to date. Read SEO blogs. Participate in SEO forums. Search engines are constantly changing, and therefore search engine optimization is a fluid process as well. I personally recommend these blogs.

What methods do you use for your site?