Register
a good domain name which reflects what your
site is about. Even if you are an established
business, don't register www.FredJones.com if
you make widgets. Rather, you want to register
something like www.BestWidgets.com because that
would inspire confidence in people looking for
quality widgets who would not necessarily have
heard of Fred Jones the widget-maker.
Name your page URLs based on reasons similar
to the above, except you can be more specific.
Search engines like to know what your page is
about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm)
or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm)
on one of the salës pages.
The text in the title tag is crucial in letting
search engines know what each page is about.
Put your important keywords in your title tags,
using both the singular and plural versions
(people will search for both) and make these
tags different and specific for each page. For
example, "Widgets and After Salës
Widget Services". Whatever you do, don't
call the home page "Index", but treat
it almost as a mini-description.
The other tags (at the top of the html page)
between the two "head" tags are not
as important as the title tag, but the description
tag is still used by some search engines in
displaying what you would like web users to
see when they scroll down a page of search results.
Some search engines don't use the description
tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use
part of it together with part of the main body
text surrounding prominent keywords on your
page. So you may as well treat the description
tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30
words) and as comprehensive as possible in the
short space allowed. Make sure you have your
popular keywords included within your description
tag.
The Alt tag is used for a
very short description of an image or graphic
file, and is what is displayed if you allow
your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic.
These days it is not considered important for
search engines.
The
Comment tag is nevër displayed on the body
page, and is used by coders and designers as
an instruction or reminder to themselves about
what that section of html coding should be doing;
in the past, some webmasters in their quest
for website promotion and search engine ranking
used to stuff keywords in the comments tags,
but today it is generally acknowledged that
the main search engines pay little or no attention
to these.
Keyword density. Each search engine has its
own preference as to how many times a keyword
phrase appears on the page in order to signify
the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other
words, in order to help the search engine understand
what the page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent
is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don't
overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as sp@m
or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords
in the heading tags H1 and H2. There is an H3
tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search
engines bother with that, as it is perceived
as less prominent on the page, therefore less
relevant to what the page is about.
Don't forget good linking
in your website marketing. Search engines will
judge the importance of your web pages to some
extent on the number and quality of incoming
links from other sites. Ask other webmasters
with sites on similar themes to yours for a
link, in exchange for a link back. These sites
should not be in competition with yours, but
should be similarly themed. You may occasionally
be asked by other webmasters if they can link
to your site. If this is so then have a look
at their site; make sure that their site is
relevant, that it has at least some PageRank,
and that it just "feels" good, and
has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected
popups. You don't want to be associated with
a "bad neighborhood"!
Make sure that important keywords are included
in the anchor text within inbound links from
other sites. This is crucial to search engines
when they try to figure out the relevance and
importance of your pages. The inbound link from
the other site should take the form of something
like this (I'm using normal brackets instead
of angle brackets so as not to use compromising
html): (A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")your
important keywords included here(/A). You should
definitely avoid something like (A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")click
here(/A), which tells search engines nothing
except that your site is about "click here".
Be careful!
