[Photo credit: Small things that makes a big impact in Life, by man's pic, on Flickr]

Help search engines list you more easily. Even a simple tweak can yield a big results in the number of people who find your website.

Title pages so humans can read them.

Each page should have a logical name that makes sense to the people reading it. This page, for instance, is titled “Small SEO Tweaks with Big Impact.” It’s not “SEO, search engine optimization, search engine changes, search engine tweaks.”

Write pages so humans can read them.

The above is also true for the text of any given page. Search engines – and people – consider it a turn-off if you pack pages with keywords you think search engines are looking for. Use natural language.

Give every image an alternate name.

This means using the so-called ALT tag, if you’re working with HTML, or specifying an image description if you’re using a content management system.

Use a sitemap.

Sitemaps, which list every page on your website, are useful for people as well as search engines. These make it easier for search engines to find and index every page of your site in a snap.

Crawlability: n. a measure of the ease with which a website may be scanned by a search engine robot.

This is one bit of jargon worth learning. It has a big impact on a site’s search engine rankings. Three things you can do to improve your site’s crawlability:

1. Add a hierarchical sitemap
2. Use descriptive URLs everywhere (i.e., pages should called about-us.html or driving_directions.html. Or better yet, get a CMS to do the hard work for you.)
3. Make sure titles and headings reflect the site’s most important elements