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Want search engine traffic? Like people visiting you? Then you’re like every webmaster in the world. What’s going to differentiate you, then, is the ability to implement and maintain the following website factors. Get going, be smart, and be dedicated – and you’ll be well on your way to a nice, targeted stream of traffic for a long, long time to come.

1. Title Tags – Your title tags should include keywords, have the most important keywords first, and be shorter than 70 characters. You can find a Title Tag optimizer here.

Bad Example – Mr James Handyman Shop – Tools, House Supplies, Yard Equipment, Wood & Sod

Good Example – Tools, House Supplies, Yard Equpment, Wood & Sod | Mr. James Handyman

2. Image Optimization - Alt tags should continue keywords and be included in your image HTML code. These help optimize your site further for targeted keywords and also make the site more searcher-friendly for those with disabilities, or with images disabled. These will also drive a significant amount of traffic through image search.

Similarly, IMG filenames should reflect your keywords and also the ALT tags you’re using. This will drive even more traffic, increase usability and provide keyword relevance to the search engines. For more depth on this subject, check out Pearsonified’s post on Image Optimization.

Bad example – <img src=”DSC00056.jpg”>

Good example – <img src=”House_Supplies.jpg” alt=”House Supplies”>

3. URL Structures – The search engines enjoy URL structures that are keyword rich, and short. The closer to the front of the URL the keyword is, the better.

Bad example – http://www.tools.com/shop/category/brand/132359?.html

Good example – http://www.tools.com/shovels.html

4. Redirects – Every website should have one URL that the server redirects to when people try and get to the front page. This means that http://www.tools.com, http://tools.com, http://www.tools.com/index.html, should all go to one place. Whether or not you choose http://www.tools.com or http://tools.com is up to you, but either one is preferable over the index.html version.

Doing this will tell the search engines which version of the site is your homepage, rather than having to guess. It will also redirect all the link juice on your site that points to each of the non-emphasized portions and point it towards your own website.

You can find redirect options through most hosting providers’ website control panel.

5. Content – Sometimes webmasters can make the mistake of having a page that’s all images, flash and gimmick. Search engines pick up on solid, written content that is keyword rich, so it’s important to always have at least a paragraph or two talking about the keyword focus of the page. Make sure you maintain usability, though, because sometimes trying too hard to talk to the search engines will mean that you will turn off the end user, the person that’s most important to reach.

6. Site Architecture – It is our strong recommendation that the more competitive and challenging a keyword is to rank for, the higher it should be in a site’s internal architecture. This allows for a higher amount of link juice, the stuff that enables a site to rank higher, to get to the page. This means that these pages you want Google to see (and rank), should be linked to from the front page, or at worst, two clicks away, for a moderately sized site.

How easy are you making it for Google to spider your site, and reach the sites you want ranking?

7. Duplicate Content – Many sites have duplicate content issues, in that they re-use several content pieces over, and over again. The search engines dislike that and can de-index these pages if they recognize them as such. A rough guideline is to have about 30% unique content on each page. Be aware that the search engines are intelligent enough to recognize site structure and things of that nature, and will most likely only be counting the body content portion of our website in these valuations.

Sometimes, duplicate content is unavoidable. In these cases, try and have these pages be linked to on deeper subpages, where link juice distribution isn’t as important. On the higher pages, you can waste linkjuice funneling to these pages that the engines see as unworthy of being indexed.

8. Site Maps – Including a site map is a good way to let the search engines know exactly what pages you want indexed, and with what priority. They won’t always adhere or completely stand by your site map, but it’s a good starting point for saying “look at this, it’s important”.

Google has a good guide to creating a site map here. You should create a site map within your own website, too.

Want more tips? Follow Ross on Twitter or check out his Authentic Marketing blog online.