If you don’t know it yet, your marketing department will be telling you about it shortly. To get visitors to come to your site via search engine results (SERPs), you need to rank in the top 20 — if not the top 10 — for searches on specific keywords/phrases that your firm is targeting. If your Web site isn’t appearing in the top 10, the chances of someone clicking on your listing drops exponentially for each subsequent page.

While writing search engine-friendly content is out of the control of the Web development team, there is a lot you can do to optimize your site markup for search engines. Here are 10 tips to help you mark-up your code properly….

Tip 1. The first rule of SEO is not to design your site in such a way that the code itself prevents a search engine bots/spiders from being able to index the site….

Tip 2. To find out what a spider sees on your site, run a spider simulator on a given page….If you’re looking for something that’s free, I’d suggest www.webconfs.com search-engine-spider-simulator.php….