Text is one of the most important elements of any web site. Of particular importance are the keywords
within the text on a page, where those keywords appear, and how often they appear. This
is why keyword marketing has become such a large industry in a relatively short time. Your keywords
make all the difference when a search engine indexes your site and then serves it up in
search results.
Keywords must match the words and phrases that potential visitors will use when searching for
your site (or for the topic or product that’s listed on your site). To ensure that your keywords are
effective, you’ll need to spend some time learning which keywords work best for your site. That
means doing keyword research (which you learn more about in Chapter 5) and testing the keywords
that you do select to see how effective they really are.

In search engine optimization, two kinds of tags are important on your web site: meta tags and
HTML tags. Technically, meta tags are HTML tags, they just appear in very specific places. The
two most important meta tags are the keyword tag and the description tag.
The keyword tag occurs at the point where you list the keywords that apply to your web site. A
keyword tag on a search engine optimization page might look something like this:
rank”>
The description tag gives a short description of your page. Such a tag for the search engine optimization
page might look like this:
optimization!”>

Not all search engines take meta tags into consideration. For that reason, you site should use both
meta tags and other HTML tags. Some of the other HTML tags that you should include on your web
site are the title tag, the top (or H1) heading tags, and the anchor tags.
The title tag is the tag that’s used in the title of your web site. This tag will appear like this:
Your Title Here
Once you’ve tagged your site with a title tag, when a user pulls the site up, the title that you entered
will appear at the very top of the page if the user is using an Internet Explorer browser (IE) earlier
than IE7, as shown in Figure 3-1. In IE7 and the Firefox browser, the title will appear on the browser
tab, shown in Figures 3-2 and 3-3.
High-level headings (H1s) are also important when a crawler examines your web site. Your keywords
should appear in your H1 headings, and in the HTML tags you use to create those headings. An H1
tag might look like this:

High-Level Heading

Anchor tags are used to create links to other pages. An anchor tag can point users to another web
page, a file on the Web, or even an image or sound file. You’re probably most familiar with the anchor
tags used to create links to other web sites. Here’s what an anchor tag might look like:
Text for link

To be of value, the links on your web pages must be related to the content of the page, and they
must be active links to real web sites. Broken links can lower your search engine ranking. Links
have always been an important factor in how web sites rank on the Web, but the abuse of linking
that we see so often today started just a few years ago, about the time that Google became the big
name in search.
When links became a ranking criterion, many black-hat SEOs began building link farms, which are
sites that are nothing more than pages full of links designed to gain high search engine rankings.
It didn’t take long for search engine administrators to figure out this sneaky optimization trick, so
they changed the criteria by which links are ranked. Now link farms are fairly ineffective, but links
on your web site are still important. Links show an interactivity with the community (other sites on
the Web), which points to the legitimacy of your web site. Links aren’t the only, or even the highest,
ranking criteria, but they are important all the same.

One other consideration, even before you build your site, is the site’s popularity. Many search engines
include a criterion for the number of times users click on web sites that are returned in search results.
The more often the site is selected from the search results, the higher in the ranking it climbs.
For you, that means you should begin building the popularity of your site, even before it is built.
Begin building buzz about the site through advertisements, info-torials, and even newsletter or other
e-mail announcements. Then redouble those efforts as soon as the site goes live to the public.
It’s a riddle to which there is no easy answer. You optimize your web site for search engines in order
to build popularity, but your ranking in the search engine can be determined by how popular your
site is. There is no magic formula that helps you solve the riddle. It requires time and consistent effort
to draw visitors to your site.

In addition to the four main elements you should plan to include on your site, there are a few others.
For example, the body text on your web site will be examined by the crawler that indexes your site.
Body text should contain enough keywords to gain the attention of the crawler, but not so many that
it seems the site is being “stuffed’ with such words.
Alternative tags for pictures and links are also important. These are the tags that might appear as a
brief description of a picture or graphic on a web site that fails to display properly. The alternative
tags — called alt tags — display a text description of the graphic or picture, so that even if the actual
image doesn’t appear, there’s some explanation of what should be there. Alt tags are a good place to
include additional keywords.

If you liked this article don't forget to subscribe and submit your website to our SEO Directory  

< Prev		Next >