Hi,

I am primarily a software developer however I tend to delve in some web development from time to time. I have recently been asked to have a look at a friends website as they are wanting to improve their position in search engine results i.e. google/yahoo etc. I am aware there is no guarentee that their position will change, however, I do know there are techniques/ways to make your website more visible to search engine spiders and to consequently improve your position in the rankings i.e. performing SEO.

Before I started looking at the SEO of the site I did the following prerequsite checks:

• Ran the website through the W3C Markup Validator and the W3C CSS Validator services.
• Looked through the markup code manually (check for meta tags etc)
• Performed a thorough cross browser compatibility test.

From those checks, the following was evident:

• No SEO has been performed on the site before.
• The website has been developed using a visual editing tool such as dreamweaver (as it failed the validation services miserably and tables where being used everywhere!)
• The site is fairly cross browser compatibile (only some slight issues with IE8 which are easily resolved).
• How the site navigation is, isn't very search engine friendly (e.g. index.php?page=home)

I can see right away a major improvement for SEO (or I at least think) would be to change the way the website is structured i.e. change from using dynamic pages such as "index.php?page=home" and actually having pages called "home.html". Other area's would be to add meta tags to identify keywords, and then sprinkling these keywords over the pages.

As I am a rookie in this department, could anyone give me some advice on how I could perform thorough SEO on this website?

Thanks in advance.