The deepest desires of search engines

The success of SEO depends on your understanding of what search engines like. In no particular order, here are few important things to keep in mind as you develop sites.

Search engines like

Content that is naturally keyword rich( not stuffed) and valuable to readers
Content that is visible to search engine spiders with no barriers that may prevent a full indexing of pages.
Content that communicates a clear information hierarchy so spiders can understand what the page is about.
Content that loads quickly so spiders can index it efficiently.
Links to your site from reputable sources so they can determine the reputation of your site.
Honest content that isn’t trying to trick the search engine.
More content than code to mark up the page.
Clean, meaningful URL’s with keywords in them if possible.
Domains that have been around for a while.

There’s a lot of logic in what the search engines are asking of us. They just want us to give them plenty of honest, high quality content in a format that they can read. As we move towards this goal, we are going to reap additional benefits, too.

For example, following accessibility standards not only broadens your audience to include users with disabilities and those on alternate devices( such as handhelds), its will also promote search engine optimization. Content in alt and title attributes-to name just a couple of elements that promote accessibility-provides more context and relevance for a search engine to understand what a page is about and can more accurately connect searchers with your page. Best practices for findability and accessibility often overlap.

People and search engines both appreciate great content . When people find useful content on a website, they tend to evangelize-creating links on their blog, links on user –generated news sites, and even discussing your content on discussion boards. Those inbound links to your site not only bring other people to your site, they boost your reputation with search engines. Search engines evaluate the reputation of a site based upon how many other reputable sites link to it This means that when you provide your users with good content, you are also improving the findability of your site.

Web standards development practices also provide great findability benefits by improving search engine optimization:

They help you avoid code errors that could prevent search engines from understanding your content.
They promote the practice of marking up your content in a semantically meaningful way (which search engines will better understand).
They help reduce the volume of code required to deliver your content, creating a better content-to-code ratio and faster indexing.
They foster best practices in coding that allow external code files to cache in the browser, speeding up the load time.