Top 5 ways to help get your site noticed
by Search Engines.
1.
Write
a Page Title Write a descriptive
title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as
many "filler" words from the title, such as "the,"
"and," etc. This page title will appear hyperlinked
on the search engines when your page is found.
Entice searchers to click on the title by making
it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of
the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD>
tags, in this format: <TITLE>Web Marketing
Checklist -- 32 Ways to Promote Your Website</TITLE>.
(It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your
web browser.)
Plan to use some descriptive
keywords along with your business name on your
home page. If you specialize in silver bullets
and that's what people will be searching for,
don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition,
Inc." use "Silver and Platinum Bullets
-- Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people
are most likely to search on should appear first
in the title (called "keyword prominence").
Remember, this title is nearly your entire identity
on the search engines. The more people see that
interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on
the search engine, the more likely they are to
click on the link.
2.
Write a Description and
Keyword META Tag
The description
should be a sentence or two describing the content
of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases
on this page. If you include keywords that aren't
used on the webpage, you could hurt yourself.
Place the Description META Tag at the top of the
webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD>
tags, in this format: Some search engines include
this description below your hyperlinked title.
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Increase
visitor hits, attract traffic through submitting
URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and
reciprocal links">.
Your maximum number of characters should
be about 255; just be aware that only the first
60 or so are visible on Google, though more may
be indexed.
When I prepare a webpage, I write
the article first, then write a description of
the content in that article in a sentence or two,
using each of the important keywords and keyphrases
included in the article. This goes into the description
META tag. Then for the keywords META tag, I strip
out the common words, leaving just the meaty words
and phrases. The keywords META tag is no longer
used for ranking by Google, but it is currently
used by Yahoo, so I'm leaving it in. Who knows
when more search engines will consider it important
again? Every webpage in your site should have
a title, and META description tag.
3.
Include Your Keywords in Header
Tags H1, H2, H3
Search engines consider words that appear in the
page headline and sub heads to be important to the
page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases
appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the
search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet
(CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it
won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and
H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note:
Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's
a mistake. Make sure your designer defines these
tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags
with other names.)
4.
Make Sure Your Keywords Are
in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text
Search engines expect that your first paragraph
will contain the important keywords for the document
-- where most people write an introduction to the
content of the page. You don't want to just artificially
stuff keywords here, however. More is not better.
Google might expect a keyword density in the entire
body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that
should rank high, so don't overdo it. Other places
you might consider including keywords would be in
ALT tags and perhaps COMMENT tags, though few search
engines give these much if any weight.
5.
Use Keywords in Hyperlinks
Search engines are looking for clues to the focus
of your page. When they see words hyperlinked in
your body text, they consider these potentially
important, so hyperlink
your important keywords and keyphrases.
To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking
to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase,
such as blue-widget.htm
-- another clue for the search engine.
