I wanted to talk about some website basics again today.  I was just about to generate a list of my own when I came across a great list at The Venture Skills Blog called "Deadly Sins of SEO Sites."  The post, which was written after looking at the websites of some SEO firms, talks about a few things that even the pros can forget from time to time.  It's a little difficult to read, so I'll recap the points made:

• "ALT" attributes in image tags - extra keywords and W3C compliance… why wouldn't you being doing this?
• Tables as layout tools - use CSS for layout and tables for data;  keep your content out of tables
• Headline tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) - some say these are good… some say they're not; the best thing for you to do is test your content both ways
• Content in images vs. text - we've heard it a million times, but some people still don't get this;  images, AJAX, and flash are NOT indexed by crawlers… so keep your content out of those elements
• Declaring a doctype and lauguage in meta tags - especially important for non-English sites
• robots.txt & .htaccess - keep both people and search engines where and how you want them;  these files give you a lot of control over who sees your content and how

Every one of these basics get forgotten time and again.  I was glad to see them mention doctypes and language, too.  That's not one you hear a lot about but it's very important.  As mentioned in the original post, language declaration is especially important if your site is NOT written in English.  The crawlers will try to figure these things out… but there's not guarantee.

The importance of basic website design best practices can't be stressed enough.  By following established website design standards, you can guarantee the search engines will find and index you.  After all, search crawler algorithms are designed around those same standards!

If you've got good content, and you master the basics, your site can thrive.

-Matt