HOTTEST Search Engine Secrets
Tips!
Take Care Of Your Most Important Visitors 1st!
by Bill Green
Who's the most important visitor to your web page?
A search engine..
It doesn't matter how well designed your site is, or if you
have great content, if you can't attract search engines to your
site you won't attract other visitors.
So how do search engines determine your ranking? They follow a
set of general rules involving the location and frequency of
keywords on your Web page. See How
Search Engines Rank Web Pages for additional information.
The most important promotion tags when you optimize your pages
are: the page title, description, and keywords. Of these, title
is most important.
Title Tag. Your <TITLE> tag should immediately follow
your <HEAD> tag. Your title is the first thing users will
read. Well-written titles carry a lot of weight and can entice
users to read your description, and ultimately, click to your
page. Your title must be descriptive, Billy's Home Page, won't
cut it! Your title tag should uniquely describe your page,
contain at least five words, one of your keyphrases, but don't
exceed 60 characters in length. This includes spaces! The Title
for this page is: 1st Site Free HOTTEST Search Engine Secrets
Tips For Newbies.
META Tags. What are META tags? Lines of HTML code added to the
start of a page's source code. META tags are not visible to your
visitor, but assist some major search engines in finding and
identifying your URL. There are several types of META tags, but
the two most important are the Description META tag, and the
Keyword META tag. Meta tags alone will not cause people to flock
to your site. Nor, are Meta tags the magic bullet for Website
promotion, but they can help.
- Description META Tag. Your description is your chance to draw
people to your page by capturing their interest and attention.
You should tell them what they will find on your page and why
they should visit it. Your description should support your title
and invite users to click on the link to your site. Limit your
description tag to 150 characters. Description META tags are used
by: Search engines that support META tags will often display the
Description META tag along with your title in their results. The
META Description Tag for this page looks like this:
-
| <META
NAME="description" CONTENT="How to optimize your pages for search
engines for free."> |
- Keywords Meta Tag. Keywords are the search words that your
visitor enters for a search engine to find your site. Your
keywords used for your META keywords should be limited to actual
words that appear in the text of your page.
- Use SEO-Tools
Keyword Density Analyzer to help you identify your keywords
and the keyword frequencies for the text that appears on your
page. This tool will analyze your chosen URL and return a table
of keyword density values for one, two, or three word key terms.
Note: In an attempt to mimic the function of
search engines spiders, it will filter out common Stop words (since
these will likely be equally ignored by search engines), it will
avoid filtering out stop words in the middle of a term (for
example: 'designing with CSS' would get through, even though
'with' is a stop-word).
- Save any three word key terms identified by the
SEO-Tools Keyword Density Analyzer for your future
reference.
- Next, list these keywords in order of importance. Include
keyphrases at least 5, with a maximum of 3 words per phrase.
Combine these keyphrases with other keywords from your web site.
Never repeat a keyword more than three times. Separate your
keywords with a comma. Don't exceed 874 characters. The META
Keywords Tag for this page looks like this:
-
| <META
NAME="keywords" CONTENT="search engine secrets, engine secrets
tips, hottest search engine, tips for newbies, site free hottest,
free hottest search, description meta tag"> |
Create your meta data for free at 1stSiteFree Meta Tag Generator.
Other free tips for top search engine placement:
- Text. Reproduce your description META tag and use this text
as the first paragraph for your webpage. Search engines like
Lycos who doesn't use META tags will use this as your
description. This paragraph should be 200 characters or less. If
possible, this should be the first visible text on the screen
when the page loads. Also, repeat the keyword phrases you
selected and use these keyword phrases in your first two
paragraphs and throughout your Webpage.
- ALT Tags. If you use images on your Webpage, use keywords as
ALT tags to improve your search engine placement with Alta Vista,
InfoSeek and Lycos.
- Comment Tags. Don't use comment tags that contain your
keywords. Some search engines consider this spamming.
- Frames. To avoid problems with frames, use a <NOFRAMES>
Tag in your main page to include descriptive text and
keywords/phrases. See this page for additional information
on
using frames.
- Image Maps. Some search engines don't spider image map links.
If you use them, make sure you also include text hyperlink.
- Dynamic Pages. Most search engines will not index pages
dynamically created by scripts. Use gateway
pages to work around this problem.
- Tests. Before your submit your URL test, test and re-test
your page. Do not promote a site before it is ready!
- Verify that your page title, description, and keywords tags
do not contain any line breaks. To test, view your page using
Notepad, turn Word Wrap OFF, each tag should appear as a separate
line.
- Test
your meta data. This free service will do a META tag analysis
to include syntax check, oversize check, META tag spam detection,
and multiple META tag detection.
- Doctor
HTML This free service will perform a spelling check, image
analysis, hyperlink verification and a HTML syntax validation
tests for each of your Web pages.
- Links. To increase your site's popularity, get other sites to
link to yours. This will increase your site popularity rating and
will boost your rank with most search engines.
- Updates. Update your pages frequently. Search engines revisit
sites with new and updated pages more often than they do static
sites. Re-register your site with the major search engines each
time you update it.
Copyright © July 2000 Bill Green. Released
with permission. Contact me directly at Bill
Green.
Visit 1st Site Free
Website for more articles, tips, tools, and online resources
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