Without a doubt, the single most important factor in getting a good ranking in search engine results is whether or not the page is included in the search engine indexes. If your page is not in the indexes, then there is absolutely no way ever that it will achieve any kind of ranking in the results pages … not good, not bad, not any.

So, here are the three basic rules for getting indexed with search engines and consequently being well on your way to a top ranking in search engine results:

1. Make your pages easy for robots to find.

• Build inbound links to the site from other sites that focus on the same search topic.
• Add sitemaps: Google and Yahoo xml external sitemaps are good but you also need an internal, plain html sitemap linked from every page of your site.
• Don’t bury your pages. Make every page available within one or two clicks of any other page on the site.
• If you move, leave a forwarding address. In other words, if you change the name of a file, redirect the old filename to the new one.

2. Make your links easy to find.

• Make the main navigation menus of your site easy to crawl by using plain html links formatted with cascading style sheets. Avoid Flash or JavaScript technology that can hide links from search engines.
• Keep your code clean - make sure it validates and remove extra code from the page. By the way, not everyone agrees about this one but there is some anecdotal validation of the value of valid code as well as some intriguing experimental evidence for the value of valid code. Html code validation and css code validation are available at the World Wide Web Consortium’s website, w3.org.
• Limit the number of links on any one page to a maximum of 100. While it’s true that today’s new and improved robots can crawl pages with well over 200 links, they will only do so for sites that are viewed as having special importance. Matt Cutts from Google still claims that fewer links are better.

3. Make each page unique.

• Search engines don’t want to display page after page from the same site all talking about the same topic so they will filter out pages their algorithm tells them are duplicate content or even pages from the same site with very similar themes.
• If each page is distinct, it has a better chance of being included in search engine indexes.