Q:  Can you tell me what I should be doing to make sure my website design is SEO-friendly?
Simon

Hi Simon, thanks for your question. I think the first thing we need to distinguish is the difference between SEO-friendly and optimised.

An SEO-friendly website typically means that search engines can actually get to your pages and crawl them. An optimised website means you've used the right keywords choices and gone through your pages and employed a lot of the strategies that are talked about here at SEOhub.

To ensure your website is search engine friendly you need to make sure it's crawlable. You will want to go and check out How to make your website crawlable by search engines to ensure you know all the strategies to employ when thinking about the crawlability of your website.

Then you can use our Spider Simulator to make sure the search engine spiders can see your website.

If you do these two things you're well on your way to making sure your website is crawlable.

The next thing you want to make sure is that you're in the index. You can do this by using the site: operator in a search engines search box (eg site:www.yourwebsiteaddress.com.au). This will bring up a list of your website's pages that are currently in the search engine's index.

The best way to make sure your website gets into the index is to set up an XML sitemap feed. You might want to check out How to set up a Google XML sitemap to help you out with this one.

Simon, these are the basics when looking at your site. If you follow these few tips your site will be search engine friendly in no time. As for making sure your site is optimised... check out the articles on SEOhub to help you along your way.