Optimizing your site can dramatically improve your site's ranking in the search engines. Everyday, millions of people use search engines to find information on products and services. Customers generally only visit the first few result pages generated by search engines which causes poorly ranked sites to be missed. Without top positions, your site could be overlooked and, therefore, undiscovered. For this reason, you want to make sure your site has every opportunity to appear high in the search engine rankings.
Though every search engine has a unique process, most search engines work by using term frequency and keywords as the primary ways of ranking Web sites. The information below provides tips on how you can improve your search engine placement.
A META tag is an HTML tag that gives information about the content of a Web page, such as what HTML specifications a Web page follows or a description of a Web page’s content. The two primary META tags used by search engines are "description" and "keywords." The description tag allows you to control the text that appears in the summary field generated by the search engine. If you do not include this META tag, search engines create the summary by cobbling together the HTML text on your page, starting at the top.
When a search engine visits your site, it considers content contained at the top of the page to be more relevant than content found further down on the page. The search engine does this by reviewing the HTML or source code of your site. Therefore, the <head>, <title>, and META “description” tags within the code, are critical in terms of relevancy.
Content relevancy is the search engine’s measure of how well a particular Web site or Web page accurately matches a searching question. Search engines follow a set of rules, with the main rules involving how popular the Web site is in terms or link popularity, keyword weight on the page, keyword saturation, and so forth.
For any Web site to produce consistent and relevant search results, there are two important factors that need to be implemented. The site needs to be optimized with the right keywords and key phrases and it needs the right amount of keyword density and keyword occurrences.
Relevancy is determined by the location and frequency of matching keywords. If the words that match the search appear high on your page and with frequency, your page will rank high on the user's search results page.
You will be penalized if the description sentence, title, and keywords are not relevant to the text. Try to make your primary keywords appear several times within that text so that your keywords have more "popularity", and make sure ALL of your information from the meta tags appear within the text of the homepage at least once (meaning your title, keywords, and description sentence should appear on the page as well). What is most
important is that your meta information is relevant to whatever text you have on the page.
Each page should have it's own meta information "relevant" to that pages text content.
Keep it simple, if you were to copy the description sentence and paste within your page text, you would be at 100% relevancy. Now, you want this text to make sense to your readers, so you add more text to clean it up and to make it reader friendly. Search engines only see text, not pictures. This is why we recommend adding plenty of text to your page so that the search engines have something to work with.
Meta Title: Should be a maximum of 80 characters.
Give the Search Engines a strong clue about your site's content by using a keyword phrase in the title.
Search Engines use the title tag as the link and main title listings on search results pages.
A title is simply that – a name for your page. This is what usually shows up in the search results and is often what people will use when linking. It is best to keep your title short and to the point. Use keywords and phrases that not only describe the page, but words that appear in the page as well. In general your site title should not exceed 80 characters including text, punctuation, and spaces. |
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Page Content: 250-300 words is a suggested text amount
(not a guideline).
There are sites with only 50 words, and sites with over 1000 words of content, both successful in a search engine because the information was "relevant" to the meta information. However, the site with more text content may rank a little better because the search engine has more text to work with and because the primary keywords may appear more often within the text making the keywords more "popular" within the page.
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Description: Should be a maximum of 200 characters.
Your description sentence should appear at least once within the actual text on the same page.
When writing your META tag description, select the most important four or five keywords per page. Write careful 200 character max sentences and phrases, targeting the most important words contained on your Web pages. When you are writing the META tag descriptions, try to eliminate as many filler words as you can to make room for your keywords.
In many cases, search engines use the site description verbatim in the search results page. The Search Engine grabs the text from the description tag and places it under the text from the title tag, so the searcher can read your description.
Overloading your description (or any other page component) with the same keyword or keyword phrase is known as spamming. This may get your page penalized rather then help your page's search engine position. It may actually cause search engines to omit your site from their index.
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Keywords: Should be a maximum of 200 characters; a maximum of 20 words.
You can separate each keyword with a comma and a space. However, you do not have to use both-you can have a comma and no space, or a space and no comma.
The Keywords META tag entry is utilized by search engines as an indexing tool. A way for you to tell the search engines what your Web site is about is to list keywords that are also found in the page content.
A common mistake made within META tag keywords is repetition of words. A good rule of thumb is never insert the same word twice even if you’re using different variations or separation with commas. Your Web site keywords should not exceed 20 words.
Do not use the same keyword tag in all your pages. You should create a primary tag to use in your home page; then copy it to other pages and move terms around in the tag.
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Robots
A site robot, search robot, or robot tag are computer software programs used by search engines to index Web sites. The Search Bot visits a Web site and reads the information stored in the site. These systems do not always read all the information on all the pages. They do however read a significant amount of this information and use complex algorithms to index the information that was retrieved from the Web site.
*an algorithm is a formula or set of steps for solving a particular problem. |
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