Search engines are businesses

Search engines are not charities. And you have no God-given right to have your site included in their index.

But if your site is in their index, remember that is is there free of charge. The search engines have listed your site for nothing - there has been no financial outlay by you. And the chances are that, once your site is listed, that listing will remain there for as long as your site is in existence. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it?

But search engines are businesses too. And in order to remain a top search engine, they have to deliver the good to their users. You wouldn't expect to have a long-lasting, established, successful business with a rubbish product, would you?

So to stay at the top of the tree in the search engine world, they have to make sure that their users are getting the very best 'product' - in other words, the best search engine results.

If you searched for a pizza restaurant in Miami today, and the results shown were for Italian restaurants in New York, you'd be annoyed. If you searched tomorrow for information about chocolate cake recipes and found that you were getting results for martini bars ... well, you'd soon find another search engine to use that provided more accurate results.

So search engines make it a great priority to make sure that the results they serve up to their users are as accurate as possible.

Bearing in mind that a search engine, to put it simply, is a computer program, then it's very important that websites are built with the search engines in mind from day one.

There is no one thing that makes a site search engine-friendly. A site which is going to be loved by the search engines is made up of many different factors. Keyword density alone isn't going to do it. Correct file names won't do it on their own. Microcontent helps but you won't get good search engine presence based on that factor alone. Code-to-content ratio is important, but the search engines look at lots of other factors. Correct grammar, spelling and punctuation are vital but they are not enough on their own. Search engines won't find you if you don't have backlinks but they're not enough to ensure that the search engines love the site. Your text-only version is a great help but your site isn't going to be indexed on the strength of that alone...

I could go on but you get the message - there is no single factor that ensures your site is search engine-friendly but it is a combination of many, many things, all of which are painstakingly calculated, tested, coded, tested again, uploaded and tested again.