One of the most overlooked and most important aspects of a commercial web site is how it ranks in search engines. Search engines love text, plain and simple. With most WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design editors like FrontPage all you get is lots of useless code that turns your 30 lines of text into 300 lines of bloated garbage you probably don't need anyway.

To see my point view the source of this page. You'll notice that there is hardly any html code at all. Now compare this to the page you're working on. I bet it isn't as compact as this page is?

How is it done?

By using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) I've placed all the coding inside a style sheet but better yet I can use the same styles over and over again without it being shown on here. For example I've told the style sheet that all the text inside this div tag should all be in the Ariel font, should be small in size but scaleable and should be justified. Another example is the red font above. I've told the Style Sheet that I want the H3 Tag to be a certain size and color.

By not having to have the text font, size and color constantly appearing in the html I'm saving TONS of bloated code. This is the kind of power CSS has and it's why you should try and learn as much as you can about using it.

Title Tags

Without a doubt a crucial part of search engine optimisation. Those first few words could mean the difference between page one and page one thousand. Most WYSIWYG designers have an empty title tag or, like dreamweaver, a title called "untitled document". If you want a laugh do a search on Google for "Untitled Document". Instead of them being where they want to be they are buried in no-mans land.

Description and Keyword Tags

I say don't bother with keywords at all and not pay too much importance to the description tag either. Hardly any engine left looks at the description tag and no well known engine looks at the keyword tag. The text on your page should be enough for the engine to feed from. But if you're using flash or frames you better put it in because you're gonna need all the help you can get :-)

DMOZ is your friend!

There is an open directory engine called DMOZ.Org and most of the biggest engines feed off of this site. It is slow, hard to submit too and then you might have to wait months and months to get on it. Is it all worth it? You bet!