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Website promotion services - support - optimization
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Web page optimization hints and tips.
 You
may or may not be familiar with the way search engines work and
how to optimize your pages to take full advantage. We have written
some hints and tips to cover most angles and most search engines.
This assumes you have at least some knowledge of HTML and meta tags
although a brief primer is included. Research shows that a listing
in the first three results pages is sufficient to bring in the visitors.
Search engine basics.
- Searching
the entire internet.
Contrary
to popular belief search engines dont search the entire internet.
They will simply search their own database for the terms you entered.
They get this information from submissions and crawling, the latter
cant be relied upon unless you have a very good hyperlinks campaign.
- Submissions
vs crawling.
Some say you do not need to submit your site to search
engines because the crawlers will find you anyway. Crawlers are
bots let loose by search engines to follow links and report back
with website data. This will only work if you can guarantee enough
sites that are listed with every major search engine, are linking
to your site.
- Regular
submissions.
The rest of us will have to get listed by submissions.
By submitting regularly you make sure the major search engines
have an up to date cache of your data. This will ensure your latest
update will get listed. We submit you on a monthly basis, more
may result in being rejected or disregarded by search engines,
less may leave you at the bottom of the listings pile.
Meta
tag optimization.
- What
are meta tags?
Meta
tags are hidden text elements within the HTML code that makes
up a web page, invisible to browsers they give instructions to
search engines. They are found between the <head></head>
tags in web pages. For simplicity each meta tag is laid out next
to its heading in this tutorial.
- Who
need meta tags?
We
all do of course. Some major search engines have stopped using
metatags in their rankings altogether, opting for plain text and
link popularity. Although this works well for them, a large number
of the big boys still use the good ol meta tag method.
- Keywords
meta tag. <meta name="keywords"
content="this,that,the other">
Keywords are not generaly shown in the search results
and they are not case sensetive so they can be arranged however
you like. Use short phrases as well as single words seperated
by commas. You shouldnt repeat each word too often in the keywords
tag, 3 - 5 times is sufficient.
- Description
meta tag. <meta name="description"
content="This and That">
This tag may be shown in search results and should be
no longer than 150 characters. You should include your main keywords
and make this a short descriptive sentance or two. Try to make
it as attention grabbing as possible, remember you only have one
chance to make a first impression.
- Page
title. <title>This that and the
other</title>
Although not strictly a meta tag, your page title may
also be listed in the search results, and will be in the blue
title bar at the top of each web page. Page title should be kept
to around 100 characters and also be short and descriptive containing
your main keywords, but not identical to your description tags.
Text
& images.
- Page
text.
This is after all the part visitors actually read and should of
course contain all your keywords for that particular page. Search
engines will log all your page text indexing keywords accordingly,
they can be repeated as many times as you like in a page this
will help search engines determine the relavence of a given keyword
for that page.
- Text
tags.<h1>Main
heading words</h1><h2>Secondary heading words</h2>
Strictly speaking H tags should be added to your text, H is simply
for heading. H tags will affect the size of text but it can be
worthwhile as some search engines use H tags to determine keyword
relavence. They should of course contain your keywords.
- Images.
Search engines cant actually see images, they know an image is
there but cant tell what it is, labelling your images with corresponding
text will help give a better page content ranking, for example
an image of a digital watch should be labelled digital_watch.jpg
to match the page keywords.
- All
together now.
When a search engine bot indexes/ranks your web page it will take
all of the above into account using what they call the location
frequency algorithm. This simply means it logs the keywords,
where they are and how often they are repeated to decide on how
important the page is for a given keyword. Simply filling all
the meta tags and page text with the same keyword wont work unfortunately,
in fact it will do the opposite and get your site booted off for
keyword spamming.
Keyword optimization.
-
Keyword targeting.
Now lets say your website has 20 products or services
and you have 5 pages with 4 products or services detailed on each
page. So the keywords might not get a good ranking for each page
because there are 3 other sets of competing keywords for each
page. The solution is to have 20 pages each detailing its own
product or service. That way there is only one set of keywords
which will have plenty of matches in the tags and text getting
your pages a better ranking.
- Hyperlinks.
Search engine bots get around your site indexing pages
as they go by following hyperlinks, preferably plain text. This
is why most pages that use buttons will have plain text links
at the bottom, just like this page. This is to ensure all search
engine bots can find their way around. You can use graphic links
and buttons as much as you like, just remember to throw some good
ol plain text in there too.
- Linking
to and from other sites.
Most of the major search engines will use link popularity
to a greater or lesser degree for page ranking. Incoming links
are better for you than outgoing links, but all links are taken
into account. Page content is also a big factor, for example if
a electronics website linked to a dog food website it wouldnt
do iether any good. Pages you link to and from should have some
related content to get a good link popularity ranking, for example
if a plastics manufacturer linked to a plastics recycler, both
sites would benefit. Hyperlinks which are also keywords get extra
ranking brownie points.
Sneaky
tricks.
- Alternative
meta tags.
Different
search engines interpret web pages in different ways, some may
prefer shorter page title some may prefer more keyword meta tags.
A subtle way to capitalize on this is to have two versions of
each page, each with slightly different tags and text. One set
being linked to the graphics or navigation buttons, the other
linked to the spider links at the bottom of each page. Each page
will get listed and ranked. Do not overdo it identical
pages will be discovered and you risk getting your site booted
from search engines. You have been warned.
- Hyperlink
tricks.
The best trick of all is to use our gateway pages to give all
your pages incoming links with your keywords hyperlinked for maximum
effect. Another trick is to have a links page and give a brief
description of each site you are linking to, hey presto related
content, get the other sites to do the same for you to give
you both extra link popularity points. Log on to our free hyperlink
request database to find willing webmasters.
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