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Determine
your key phrases:
Do not get too possessive about keywords. They'll rarely give you good
rankings in the search engines. Instead, you need to think about keyphrases.
The easiest way
to do this is ask yourself "what would someone trying to find my site type
in when they search?" Make a list of these; try them out on the search
engines, pretend to be looking for your product or service.
Two key
places to search for keyphrases are GoTo.com
and wordtracker.
The title tags:
Your Web Page Title is an important part of your organization's web page located
near the top of your html source. This is the first thing that is seen when a
web page is loaded on both a customer's web browser or a Search Engine Spider.
Most people make the mistake of using a page title that's good for people but
lousy for the search engines. Big mistake.
All your most important
keywords should be in the TITLE tag. And make a
real sentence! Browsers only display the first few words of a title
tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So, while the first
sentence of your title tag should be "human readable", the rest can be
just a list of keywords. The title tags should contain a maximum of 70
characters and should look like this:
Keyword meta tags:
The keywords you use should be the phrases or words your
customers would enter into a search engine. You should assume that 50% of your
customers are not quite sure what exactly they are looking for, so you need to
cover the spectrum as fully as possible to give your customers the best chance
of finding you! Please keep the description between 100 and 200 characters.
You can
repeat your keywords up to six times. Search Engines rate your web site by
relevancy to the user's query. The more words that you have that match what the
user is looking for, the more of a chance that you will be visited by them. You
can duplicate your keywords a maximum of 6 times,
and they must not
be right next to each other. They should look something like this:
Description
meta tags:
Your website's source HTML should also include a meta description tag. This meta
tag resides in the header of your HTML source and looks like this:
The Meta Tag
Description should contain a short description of the web-page. Your Meta Tag
Description should make the end-user want to visit your site. You are limited to
around 25 words or 250 characters, but if used correctly it should prove
sufficient. Again, you can repeat the keywords/keyphrases in your description a
couple of times. This description is what you see when you search on the
search engines.
The first paragraph:
The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon
everything in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases
in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be
written with them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your
visitors, so you want to make a good impression. Try to put this first paragraph
as close to the tag as possible. Avoid putting graphics or other HTML in front
of your first paragraph as much as you can. Many of the search engines go to
body of your web page and catalog the text of your web site. Some search engines
read the text to verify keywords found in your Meta tags and Title tags. A
couple of the major engines do nothing but read the first megabyte of text on
your page and catalog your page from what they find there.
Frames:
Framed web pages have become very popular in the past year or so, but,
unfortunately ALL of the major search engines have reported problems in
cataloging these pages. A framed page consists of at least one page existing on
the same page as another. This layering of web pages confuses Search Engine
spiders and thusly they are unable to catalog your web page properly.
Search Engines suggest that you
create a splash / welcome page for your web site. This welcome page is just a
basic, non-framed, front page that has all the above meta, title, and text
information and a graphic that proclaims "Click Here to Enter".
Putting it all together
Your webpage and your search
engine tags should look something like:
You can find a good
FREE metatag generator and FREE website submission service here.
Your site is now ready for submission to search
engines. It's recommended you resubmit between 3-6 weeks. It is advisable to
revise your meta-tags and change the title, keywords and description before you
submit again.
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