Google provides some fairly clear suggestions on how to best increase your chances of being listed on their search engine. These guidelines are a good starting point for thinking about website optimisation.

Content and design rules

- Ensure websites have a clearly defined order of importance as well as text links. Every page should be accessible from a minimum of one static link.

- Implement a sitemap to enable users with links to be directed to the key pages within your site. If your site map is more expansive than 100 links, break the site map into different pages.

- Build a useful, informative, robust site including pages that clearly articulate your content.

- Brainstorm about words that browsers would use in search fields in order to find your site, and ensure that these keywords are used in the body of the website.

- Use text embedded within the website content rather than images to display important names, content, or links. If images are used, ensure that they are tagged (Alt Tags) so that Google can identify the images as representative of text.

- Fix broken or ineffective links.

Technical rules

- Most search engines see a site as text. Therefore use a text browser such as Lynx to examine the website to view the site the same way as search engines. A site that can be viewed and navigated with a text browser will have a better chance of being correctly indexed.

- If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash prohibit you from seeing your complete site in a text browser, search engine spiders will encounter difficulty crawling your Web site.

- Permit search robots to crawl the website freely.

- Use the robots.txt file on the website. This file tells crawlers which directories have the ability to be crawled. Ensure it’s current so that there is no accidental restriction of the “Googlebot” crawler.

- Avoid duplicate content or use a robot.txt file within the website to manage search engine indexing.