UCSF → School of Pharmacy → Information for Web Developers → Web Developer's Guide → Step 7: Set up your connection to the server → Ensure that search engines rank your site well

Ensure that search engines rank your site well

To ensure that search engines rank your site and pages as high as possible:

1. Ensure that all pages in your site validate using the W3C Markup Validation Service.
2. Ensure that all pages in your site have proper title elements. For example, if all the page titles in your site have the same name, how can people find what they need quickly when all search results listings for your pages will say the same thing?
3. Use headings and markup structure logically.
4. Avoid using text as graphics. In other words, don't set large quantities of text or very important text in Photoshop as images.
5. Check your site regularly for broken links -- see Linkchecking.
6. Use a properly descriptive alt attribute on every image that is considered content.
7. Ask other relevant sites to link to the new site.
8. Order new business cards that include the new site's URL.
9. Ask all faculty and staff members affiliated with the new site to put the URL in their email signatures and to use it in profiles for any social networking sites they might have joined -- LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. -- anywhere they have created a public profile.
10. Use the new site's URL in all communications that represent the unit, lab, or department.
11. Submit your new site's URL to the Open Directory Project.

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