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Written by Matt Colyer
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Internet surfers use search engines more than any other tool to find
things online. Search engines rank their results using a complex
formula that considers web page content, link popularity and other
details. This is why you should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your
web site.
First
before you start you need to identify your keywords. It is critical
that you know and understand the search terms surfers will use to find
your web site with. If your not sure yet try thinking of search terms
you would use to find your site. After you find your keywords make a
list of about 50 (If you can find that many) keywords and target them.
Next
you need to identify your competition. Start searching with your site's
targeted keywords and research the top ranked competing sites. Create a
list of the top 10 to 15 sites and review each one of these web sites.
While reviewing each of the competing sites look at the SEO methods
that they use.
Meta tags are thought by most to have little
impact, If any at all, on your site's ranking, but is still recommend
to use. It's better to be safe than sorry! The meta description tag is
used to describe a web page's content to the search engines. Most
search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc) get the web site's description
from the web page's content and not from the meta description tag.
Write a description of your site here and make it short.
The
keyword tag tells the search engines what keywords are related to your
site. You should place your main keywords here and add no more than 15
keywords. The Title tag is probably one of the most important SEO
techniques today. Not only will the search engine's spider see this,
but also the surfers. Place your main keywords in it and be creative.
Don't make it longer than it needs to be.
Keyword density is a
key part of SEO. On each page write approximately 200 to 500 words.
Write it with your targeted keyword phrases. Remember not to over due
it and get banned from the search engines for spam or make your
visitors hate you. Put your keywords in bold and in the heading tag.
Try to get a density of 5 to 15%. If your not sure what you keyword
density is try using
http://superiorwebmaster.com/webmaster-tools/page_primer.php.
Search
engines will not only use links to find new sites, but they'll count
each link to a site and use this to determine how popular that site is.
What you want to get is quality links. These links should come from web
sites that are related to your topic. Don't exchange links with every
site you can. Take time to check each one before exchanging links. Make
sure they are a clean and professional site. Look to see if they use
spam.
Other thing to consider is to make sure HTML is valid.
Spiders are somewhat like the browser you use, they read the HTML to
display the web page. If your HTML code contains errors, spiders might
not be able to find the content on the page. Although most spiders will
try to correct minor errors in HTML code, it could still hurt your
ranking. Visit w3.org to have your HTML code validated.
About the Author
Matt Colyer is the owner of the www.superiorwebmaster.com. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer. |
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