Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Web Page Search Engine Optimization
When creating a new web page, from the very start you want to be conscious about making sure it is properly optimized for the search engines. There are certain steps you will want to take to make sure that you are targeting your page for the keywords and phrases that you want.
Something to keep in mind when optimizing your page is, when you are strategically placing your keywords throughout your page, you want to make sure that what you are doing is not blatantly for the purpose of optimization. You want everything to make sense to your visitor; otherwise you may be accused of keyword spamming.
The first step, before you even start creating the page is to decide the keywords and phrases you want to target. Make a list of possibilities and then choose the top 3.
TITLE
Once you start creating the page, place the most important keywords in your title tag. This tag gets the highest relevance for keywords, so your wording of the title is very crucial. Do not over do it, buy placing your keywords in your title more than once. For example, if your main key phrase is "toaster ovens", a good title would be something like "Toaster ovens are the new wave of the future". You want to give your key phrase some additional information to describe it and use no more than 8-12 words in your title.
META TAGS
Next, you'll want to set up your meta tags. As far as I know, some search engines will look at your meta tags and others will not. As a rule I always create meta tags, just in case.
There are two types of meta tags that I always use. The first is your keyword meta tags, and the second is your description.
When entering your keyword meta tags, you can use keywords, or key phrases. Each keyword or phrase will be separated by a comma. You'll want to enter your main keywords first and on down the line. I would recommend using 15-20 keywords or phrases here. Be careful not to repeat any and make sure they are relevant to the page you are referring to.
Your meta tag description should be around two complete sentences long, describing the information your page or website includes.
PAGE CONTENT
Next you will need to create your page content. If your key phrase is "ebay business", you will want to sprinkle this phrase through your page. Try to keep it evenly sprinkled from the top to the bottom of the page. An average of 1 or 2 key phrases per paragraph is what you should shoot for. As with everything else, be careful to not over-do it.
Graphics and pictures on your page are also a great place to put your keywords. You can place your keywords in the ALT tag of your graphics. Be sure that when you do this, it still makes sense and describes your graphic.
If you can also create a couple hyperlinks on the page that contain some of your keywords, this can help with the optimization as well.
I try to keep my page between, 500-800 words. This is a good general rule, but obviously it's not going to apply to every page.
When I'm creating a web page, it helps if I just try to take a step back from the page and view it the way a search engine spider would. How often do your keywords show up in the source of the page?
You can always search your keywords in Google and see how others have optimized their pages to achieve the results they have.
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The Five Ways You Should Be Using Keywords
We have all read lots of articles on how to gather keywords, how to compile a huge keyword list, how to make these keywords relevant to our web site. But exactly what do we do with all these keywords once we have them?
Knowing where and how you can use your keywords will greatly improve the efficiency of your search engine optimization.
There are 5 places in a web page where you can use keywords:
The Title Tag
The Keyword Meta Tag
The Description Meta Tag
Alt Tags for images
Body copy on the page
Of these the page Body Copy, the readable text on the page, is the single most important place for your keywords. More about this later.
Let's first take a look at the Title Tag. This is one of the tags in the head section of the html code of your web page and lists the title that is displayed in the web browser. For instance, Internet Explorer displays this tag in the top bar of the browser window. But there are other uses for the Title Tag as well. Most search engines will index this tag for information about your site and many search engines will use this tag as the title of your listing.
In general you can use from 60 to 115 characters in a Title Tag. The Tag can include the company name, especially if it is a well known company, and should include your most important keywords. Consider this a short description of your web page. One more thing, the Title Tag is also used as the link when the URL is saved into a web browser favorites list.
The Keyword Meta Tag used to be the main way search engines indexed your page. Now-a-days many search engines will simply ignore this tag, but that may not always stay the case. Some search engines still take s look at this tag to help categorize your site. There is no reason not to have this tag on your page, just in case. You are not penalized for including a Keyword Meta Tag.
The keywords should be separated by a comma. Put more specific keywords first then put the less important and general keywords later on. Search engines no longer pay attention to the case of a keyword, so the keywords can all be lower case. I have seen recommendations of 25 keywords or 1000 characters in the list. In general Keyword pairs or triplets are better than single keywords. I try to have one or two lines of keywords if I use this tag.
The Description Meta Tag is slowly joining the Keywords Meta Tag on the lack of support list. But right now it is still a valuable place to use your keywords. Many search engines will look at the description Meta tag for keywords to compare against your body copy. Yahoo goes one step further and will use your description tag as the description of your site in their listings.
Consider the description tag just like it is named, a concise description of your site. Keep it to a short paragraph, under 50 words.
Alt tags are text descriptions that are included with the code used to display images on a page. Basically an Alt tag is the Alternate Text version of the image in case the image is not displayed. Alt tags are important for creating a fully accessible site for people who use screen reader technology that reads the page out loud through their computer speakers. Obviously an image cannot be read aloud, but the Alt tag can.
Alt tags are also displayed as a quick popup when you "hover" your mouse pointer over an image. Many search engines, including Google, will index the Alt tags along with the rest of the body copy, making these ideal places to slip in a few more keywords. Just keep in mind that the text should accurately reflect the content of the image. Plus don't use Alt tags on images that would not normally be read out loud, such as separator lines or bullets.
This brings us to the main place to use your keywords, the body copy on the page, the text that your visitors are reading when they visit your site. The major search engines will no longer give you a top placement just for having the most instances of a particular keyword on your page. They will give top listing to what they believe is the most relevant page on a topic.
Your job is to work your keyword into the text frequently, but appropriately. Select one or two keywords and make the page specifically about those keywords. Think of yourself giving a PowerPoint presentation to an audience of your best customers. Your PowerPoint slides will be your paragraphs. They should be concise and to the point, using your keywords to drive home your point. And, just like in a PowerPoint presentation, you can use bulleted lists to call out the several benefits of your site or product, each time relating it to your selected keyword.
So use your keywords appropriately on your site and use them where you can. This will greatly increase your search engine effectiveness.
Article copyright 2005 George Peirson
About The Author: George Peirson is the CEO of How To Gurus. He is the author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles. To see training sets and other articles by George Peirson visit http://www.howtogurus.com
Search Engines Secrets - Easy To Follow.
1) Before you start, you must find the right keywords. If you
optimize your WebPages for the wrong keywords you will fail on
your campaigns. Try to avoid the highly competitive keywords
such as "Work from home", for example. You can't beat millions
of competitive websites. There are two Great free tools for
finding keywords: http://www.goodkeywords.com and overture
suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com
2) The page optimization easy rules you must follow are these:
a) Put your keyword in your title tag, for example we will use
the keyword "self improvement software" self improvement
software
b) Put your keyword in the heading tag - self improvement
software
c) Bold with tags the keyword inside your text.
3) Mention your primary keyword at the very top left and at the
very bottom right hand side of the webpage. A trick you can use
is to include this in the copyright information line at the
bottom of the website. This would be a good example:
http://www.selfimprovement.com - A self improvement software.
4) Use the image tag with your keyword. Be careful. Do NOT fill
the tag with many keywords. It will be considered as spamming
and search engines will ban your site.
5) List your site in Google in 24 hours. Yes, you can do that by
many ways actually. There is no need for waiting 6 weeks in
order for your site to be indexed. You can do it in 24 hours by:
a) Purchasing links with big page rank from other websites like:
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com (paid solution)
b) Creating your own Blog for Free to http://www.blogger.com and
Google will crawl your site in 24-48 hours max.
6) Next step is to search for the Top 1 site on search engines
for your keyword. Study your competition and check what they are
doing right. First check the tags and optimization rules they
follow and then check the websites that are linked with it. You
can do it by going to Google and typing in the search box:
link:http://www.competitorsite.com. In this way, you will find
the website's link partners and you can contact them and trade
links, especially those with high page ranks.
7) Avoid the spamming techniques like hidden text (having same
color text with page background and human eye can't see it), too
many keywords in your title tags, description tags and keyword
tags. They will not help you in your ranking, plus your site is
in danger of being banned from search engines.
8) Link your website's pages together. Don't have them just
standing in your web server. Search engine robots follow links
and if your pages are connected, they will crawl the whole
website and index all your web pages.
9) You can follow these procedures manually with no cost at all.
It will take you more time though. If you want to automate all
your search engine campaigns then an excellent tool for that is
http://www.seoelite.com
About The Author:
Christos Varsamis is a Business writer,
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