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Designing
pages that rank highly is part art, part technology. Before you
can begin you need information on what the search engines want to
see.
Each search engine uses its own criteria
to rank sites. Most of them weight the title heavily, then the META
description tag, then the visible text on the page, sometimes giving
more weight to headlines or the first few words. With that in mind
be sure to put primary key words in the title, description, and
headline.
Keyword Research
Experts spend more time on keyword research than any other aspect
of search engine optimization. A good keyword research tool
will tell you exactly what words and phrases surfers are actually
using. Overture provides keyword
research data free of charge, but GoTo's data is skewed because
they ignore plurals and spaces. It's a good start though. WordSpot
sells superior data but at high cost. Their "WordSpot Now"
Keyword and Keyphrase Report gives you 100 Reports for $425. To
save money I use GoTo to get a feel for the market, then WordSpot
to get the details.
Title
Titles are extremely important for success with most search engines.
A title like "Charlie's cool site" may be fun, but "Boston
Golf and Caddie Shop" will get 200 times the search engine
hits. Usability hint: the text in your title is saved as a bookmark
and should make sense to the surfer when seen there or on a search
engine results page. It also helps people figure out where they
are on your site. A well designed title has relevant keywords but
is also a navigation aid.
META tags
There are many meta tags, but most of them are useless and can even
hurt your rank. You only need one META tag: the meta description
tag. For an example of meta tag usage, view the source of this web
page to see how I have used them.
- Meta tags belong in the header
section of your web page (between the <head> and </head>
tags).
- Use all small letters! (golf
= golf and Golf, but GOLF = GOLF not golf).
The meta description tag allows
you to control how a search engine describes your site. Without
a META description tag the search engine will display the site title
followed by the first 200 characters of visible text on the page.
Since your first 200 characters probably won't be the best description
of your site, it's a much better to tell the search engine what
you want it to say. Be sure your description contains keywords and
is appealing to the surfer. Remember, this will often be the first
thing the surfer sees when they are deciding whether to click to
your site.
The meta keyword tag is now ignored
by many search engines and some engines even reduce your rank for
using it. I use it because I'm an old timer but it is safe to omit
this tag.
The meta robots tags
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
and
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">
are useful if you want to prevent search engines from indexing individual
pages.
Remember that nothing in a META tag is
visible to a surfer on your page (unless he views your source).
The description and keywords you put in meta are only used by search
engines. The only time a surfer sees the content of your META tags
is when he sees your listing on the search engine's results page.
Some Rules of Thumb
- Do not use "text same color as
background." Invisible text will get your page banned.
- Do not repeat a key word or phrase more
than 3 times per tag. It's considered "spamdexing" and
can get you banned. (Some optimizers believe that up to 7 repetitions
is ok.)
- On link popularity: The best links are
text links that have your keywords in them. Links from sites that
are listed in Yahoo and other large directories are the most valuable.
If you run a site for webmasters please exchange
links with us.
- If you manage to get one of your pages
into the top 20, leave it alone. Additional tweaking of a successfull
page is much more likely to decrease its rank than raise it.
- "Keyword
density" is a weighted factor on many search engines.
Density can be too high. Many search engines set an upper threshold
to eliminate spam sites. 1-3% keyword density is generally good
although some search engines will favor pages with a density as
high as 7%. Study the individual search engines.
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