Top Ten ways to help Google index your site

Occasionally, I will be posting webmaster tips. These are bits and pieces of knowledge that I've picked up myself over the years, and are by no means the "correct" way to do things. If you disagree with any of my top tens, let me know. :)

1. When I build a new site, I place a link to it's home page on one of my established sites (for example, my web design site). This might technically be in the grey area of Google guidelines, but it can often get new sites indexed in less than 24 hours (at least the home page). This also works for Yahoo, but seems to be less effective for MSN.
2. Put the site into your list of sites on the Google webmaster tools page. Then, add a sitemap and verify the site. I don't know if this will speed up the process, but it at least gives you a centralized area to manage the site.
3. Validate your code using a website validator at w3c.org. If there are problems with your HTML, search engine bots might have a hard time reading and indexing your page
4. Build a linking structure in such a way that all pages are within 2-3 clicks of each other. This makes it easier for the user to navigate and the search engines will also be able to find their way around.
5. In your linking structure, don't use "hidden" links that search engines can't follow. For example, Flash links, Javascript, etc. To check, hover over the link: if the link URL isn't shown in the browser's bottom pane, then a search engine may not be able to follow it.
6. Follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines when building the site. Nothing sucks worse than a site that's banned before it can even get off the ground.
7. Don't use black-hat SEO techniques
   
8. Choose your keywords carefully and don't "keyword stuff". If you have more than 15 or 20 keywords, you're probably stuffing. Some search engines don't care. Google does, so don't get penalized for that.
9. Make sure each page has a separate and distinct DESCRIPTION in your meta tags. The description should describe the page. Make sure to add keywords to your description in a natural way.
10. Make sure that the keywords in your KEYWORDS meta tag are different on each page, and that they adequately describe the page's main topics.

The most important is #1. Google puts a premium on links, and will index sites with good inbound links far faster than those without. If you notice, I didn't mention actually submitting the URL to Google. It's a waste of time - don't do it!