Search engines today have become an integral tool for information search. They efficiently synchronize the massive data making it user friendly. When a user enters his query into the search engine a list of relevant results called hits are displayed. The websites offering services relevant to the user queries want to be ranked on a priority above others.  Hence to bag that coveted position it’s necessary to have a search engine friendly site. What actually does a search engine friendly site mean? Is it just about having a content rich site and sacrificing on the aesthetic value? Or, is it just stuffing your web pages with an over dose of keywords? The answer is actually none of the above. Below are listed certain simple steps that ensure you have a search engine friendly site.

• It is necessary to ensure that your site is found by the search engine in the first place. A common myth many people have is that its sufficient to submit a new site through add URL forms or submission services. But following only these practices do not help your site show up in the search engines index. Rather what is important is to have a link from a site that is already there in the search engine’ index. Subsequently the search engine would find the link, visit your site and add to its index.
• Search engine crawlers crave for good content. Providing high quality content especially on the home page is very essential. This would attract visitors and lure web masters to link to your site. The content is to be formed keeping in mind the keywords users would type to find your pages. A general myth common among many is that the search engines like plain HTML text and not recognize the aesthetic beauty. Or in other words you should have all your content placed before the graphical component. But this is not true you can actually have best of both worlds. It doesn’t natter where your content is placed the search engines will eventually find it. The challenge lies in the fact that how creatively your information is presented.
• An important thing which the search engines look at is the title and the meta description tags of each page. Relevance of title tags and meta tags depends upon the search engines. The meta description tags might not appear in the result pages of Google but still they index it. But on the other hand Yahoo uses them as description to appear on the result page.
• Another important thing is to have site map for your web site. This is the best way to let the search engine crawler know about the pages on your site that it might not discover otherwise. A site map is the list of pages present on your website. Having a site map makes it simpler for the crawler to navigate on your site.
• Lastly you need to constantly monitor your site statistics to know your audience preference. This is important to find out which of your pages deliver best ROI. Once this is known you can channel your efforts towards those pages.

Other the keeping in mind the above mentioned factors one should ensure that the web site does not get penalized by the search engine. Do not resort to unethical means like stuffing your pages with key words or attempt to cloak pages. Having pages that are not for the end user may be considered deceptive by the search engine crawler and may completely ignore your site.