I agree and will try to do better with the post titles

Also, I’ve noticed that a lot of your titles are editorials on the subjects. Concise descriptions of the subject of the post are more search-friendly and social news-friendly.

And the fixing the code stuff is all well and good, but even for something like altering the header image to include hidden text, I don’t have the knowledge right now to do that Hence, the call for help.

One thing I noticed is your xhtml is not very well formed. For instance, for your top navigation it appears it’s supposed to be an unordered list (a very good thing for SEO) but the list is missing it’s enclosing “ul” tags. Minor xhtml gaffs like that can hurt your rank when search engines parse your page.

Another thing is to put text where you have certain images. For example, the header logo of your site is a “span” with a background-image. One better way of going about it is to use an ‘h1′ tag with a background image and the text “Friendly Atheist” within the tag as well. The text can be hidden using a number of techniques (search for ‘css text replacement’, the text-indent method is my preferred but there are others). This is not only semantically more correct (an h1 tag is the most prominent header tag) but allows search engines to “read” your site as a normal person would, except with text instead of an image.

A good rule of thumb is to design the site with a blind person using a screen reader in mind. That means using ‘alt’ properties for ‘img’ tags, and using text replacement techniques for structural images like the header of the site as well as ensuring proper document ‘flow’. A search engine crawler is essentially like a blind person with javascript turned off so the better you accommodate that, the easier it will crawl it. Not to mention the benefits to an actual disabled person visiting the site.

You can use the w3c’s validator to check your code. Don’t be intimidated by all the errors and warning, most are probably caused by the improper doctag placement and other issues early in the page. The accessibility validator is also a good place to see potential problem areas.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Works like a doozy for me.