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There are no big secrets to search engine ranking these days, and most sites can benefit from a range of relatively simple improvements that may also improve the clarity and usability of your pages. The evidence is all in the source code but requires a little understanding of the way that search engines see your site.
Most of the world's popular search engines use software "spiders", "robots" or "bots" that traverse hyperlinks indexing pages. They generate a structured digest of the contents of Web pages and use this to match against users' search terms. Spiders do a complex job and benefit from having the right ingredients laid out for them.
Open the door to robots
Spiders follow a blind programmatic logic that must be very fault tolerant; they will attempt to index the worst "tag soup" markup on the planet. If spiders encounter code that doesn't make sense to them, they may well skim over it and move on. If search robots overlook large chunks of your pages, your site will not be indexed as well as the next, so it pays to have valid markup.
See Anchor Points: HTML markup validators for some tools that will help identify any problems with your markup.
Another variant on this "visibility" principle is that search engine robots do not have Javascript interpreters and will be blind to any content that is generated dynamically. If you output page content using document.write() statements, that text will not be seen and any links it may contain will not be followed.
The use of javascript: pseudo-protocol URLs in hyperlinks is also a big obstacle for robots (as well as human users with Javascript disabled); if the robot cannot follow the link it may well stop at your home page.
Metadata enhancement
Some search engines will index the content of specific named meta elements in the head of Web pages, particularly description and keywords fields. The number of Internet search engines that take this approach is dwindling because many sites overload these fields with misleading terms, but if you use these fields, choose significant terms that have relevance to the page content.
People tend to use phrases rather than single words in their search queries, so try to second-guess the phrases people may use to find content like yours.
<meta
name="description"
content="Simple, effective advice about optimising the
search engine ranking of your Web page" />
<meta
name="keywords"
content="search engine optimisation, search engine
ranking, ranking, optimisation, Web page, visibility,
robot, spider" />
Search engines may not use description text for matching queries, but this field may be used for results summaries, to give a flavour of the site content, and may help lead people in. General advice is to keep the description field succinct and start with the most important words. Search engines may penalise a site if it repeats certain terms too frequently, and people are increasingly wary of over-stated claims so don't flatter yourself with unfounded rhetoric.
Match relevance with markup
The document title element is significant to some search engine spiders because it can indicate the content of your page very specifically. If an author has taken the trouble to write a title, chances are good that it will be relevant to the document. Use concise, significant and relevant terms that match the subject of the page and put the most important words first.
The use of HTML headings can also indicate the significance of key terms on your page; using h1, h2 and h3 elements shows the search engine spiders the that these words are important. If these elements seem too basic in their raw state, style them with CSS rather than loose the structural clarity they bring.
Search engines may also index the alternative text of image elements. Adding meaningful and significant descriptions of the images on your Web pages will not only help your search engine ranking, but will help visitors who browse with image loading switched off and those using screen readers.
The presence and frequency of significant terms in the body text of your Web page will also contribute to the overall weighting assigned to your page. Some search engines may downgrade Web pages that over-use certain words or phrases, otherwise known as "spam" because it comes with everything.
Link popularity
One final aspect of search engine optimisation that you have less direct control over is the number of sites that have links to yours. Some search engines index the number of links to a site as a measure of its quality. Creating compelling content and a site worth linking to pays off in many ways.
Anchor Points
See the comprehensive Search Engine Watch site for detailed analysis and news on all the top search engines, and Webmaster World for discussion fora on search engine optimisation. And this brief but effectual article on Using XHTML / CSS for an effective SEO Campaign by Brandon Olejniczak at A List Apart picks out a few further good reasons to keep it simple.
