Search Engine Optimization SEO
Search Engine Optimization SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process that makes a website friendly to the spiders and search engine robots as possible to generate high rankings on the various search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask.com. One way to do search engine optimization is within the HTML that is used to create your site in the meta tags, which are words or phrases embedded in the HTML and accessible to robots but not to a normal website viewer. You can see this on any website by clicking on “view” at the top of your web browser, then selecting “source”. You can then study the HTML of any webpage.
The most important meta tags of any site are located at the top of the source page etween the codes: <head> and </head>. To create meta tags, you simply type the words you want as meta in the appropriate areas on the page. For marketing purposes, you will care most about the Title, Description and Keywords meta tags. These tags are what web surfers will see when they view your site listed on search engines– which means that they will be some of the most important factors in whether a person decides to view your site or not. The “title” is what viewers see at the top of your page to the left. In Windows, this appears on the blue bar at the very top and on this page it states: “Search Engine Optimization SEO”. This is a pretty prominent area for first-time viewers to see and they might decide to stay at your site or go elsewhere based on the information found in the title. This is also what automatically shows up when someone bookmarks your site. Some webmasters don’t even put titles and just leave the default. You do not want to do this if you want to optimize your website for users and for searching. For each page, you’ll want to have a descriptive title. Amazingly, many web site designers fail to put a descriptive title on each separate page or even just leave the default! Following this advice will help you in your search engine rankings.
For instance, if I had a website that sold auto parts and the name of my business was AutoPartsMax, I may want to make my descriptive title AutoPartsMax: We Sell Auto Parts! This lets the user know who I am and what my website does. You’ll want to cover both areas because a person will either be searching for your company specifically OR what your company does, and you will want to be well-placed in the rankings for either occasion.
The meta tag known as the “description” is what shows up when a person actually looks at the website from the search engine page. This is HIGHLY important and is basically the primary factor in what will lead people to your site from search engine results. The description should be well-written, attention-catching and most importantly, tell the searcher what exactly your site can do for them.
Keywords are the words that your potential visitors will be typing into search engines to find your site, the search terms. So for your keywords, ponder what sorts of terms someone who would be wanting to find a site like yours would type into Yahoo or Google. Put these keywords in your meta tags and include them within the first 25 words
of your homepage.
Here are additional tips on selecting keywords:
-Use plurals in addition to singular words, but don’t go overboard with repetition
-Misspell the keywords if the misspellings are common and people will make mistakes in typing them. If your business name or site name is often misspelled, include those common misspellings, too.
-Don’t always use the most obvious keywords, at the expense of others that might be useful. For instance, a website dealing with Siamese cats might include cat and rank low in the search rankings, but for siamese it would rank higher and therefore be more useful to use “siamese” as a keyword rather than “cat”.
-Don’t exceed over 1,000 characters with your combined keywords. The fewer keywords, the more effective they will be.
Register with the major search engines (Yahoo!, Google, MSN, Ask) and register for their free directories and any other free directories in your line of business. Supply your information to any site you find that offers a free listing for websites of your type. Use the same seven-word description for all of them, as well as 10 or so keywords. Maintain your listings on a regular (monthly) basis, to ensure they’re up to date and still effective.
Choose your domain name carefully. You do not want one that sounds too spammy as this could downgrade you in the search engine rankings.
Just as important as your meta tags is your content– if you make a good website with great content, the search engines will follow and so will visitors. Make sure to focus on the first 20 words especially, as these are important for visitors’ eyes and for search engine algorithms.
When designing the site, keep away from Flash or pages with frames. Website visitors often find these annoying– they’re slow and take lots of time to load or move to other pages. They also make your pages more difficult for search engine bots to find your content. Stay with a good HTML site.
Don’t repeat the same words over and over in your articles, as this will cause “keyword stuffing” to be suspected by the search engines and they will ignore your site or even penalize your site and downgrade it in the rankings. The same could happen from repeating words in the meta tags.
Here is a good website for discussions about search engine optimization:
SEO Chat
Submitexpress has some free tools that are usefull
You may want to also enlist the services of a search engine optimization firm; however, I advise against it unless you are a huge company or something of that nature. You can follow this advice and you can really enhance your rankings without paying big bucks to a firm for advice.
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Good advice, i am sure a lot of readers will benefit from this. Way better than paying some for SEO optimitzation, keep up the good work.