I recently attended the “An Event Apart” web design conference in New Orleans. One of my favorite speakers talked to us about essential markups for SEO. I compiled a list which I think every web developer should know. One of the most common requests from clients is that they want their page to “show up in Google.” These markups should help you.

1. URL - Key words within a URL may be the single most relevant way to “show up in Google.” Say someone is searching for “chicago web design.” The site www.chicagowebdesign.com is going to have a higher ranking than www.websoulationschicago.com. Google puts high priority to keywords contained in the URL.
2. Headings - Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) play an important rule in SEO. Make sure any section titles are in heading tags. On top of that the lower the heading number, the more relevant it is to search engines. So, and h1 will carry more weight than an h3 tag.
3. <strong> & <em> - Beleive it or not, search engine spider put more weight on keywords that are within <strong> and/or <em> tags.
4. Meta Description - A meta description can have significant impact on your search engine ranking. After all it is what shows up as your description when someone is viewing search results.  One thing to note is that meta keywords are not scanned by search spiders.
5. Alt & Title Attributes - Make sure your images have alt and title tags. Search engines can’t see images, but they can read alt and title tags. On top of that, it makes your site more accessible to the visually impared. This is an absolute must do. Dreamweaver has a helpful featgure that requries you enter an alt tag when inserting an image.
6. Table elements: ,
   , and summary - These 3 tags are in the same boat as the alt and title tag, only these apply to tables. These tags can help your ranking and improve the efficiency in which search engines crawl your page
7. Stylesheet - Include keywords in your stylesheet. Believe it or not this can help your ranking. Having a stylesheet named webdesignchicago.css can help your ranking more than using a stylesheet named styles.css
8. Logo image name - Since your logo is often the first thing crawled on a page by search engine, it is important to have a filename for that logo that includes keywords.