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| Smart Web Center - Basic Search Engine Tutorial |
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Optimizing Your Site for the Search Engines
This tutorial is for beginners and is intended to give a broad overview of search engine optimization. It is not a detailed step by step to learn the intricacies of search engine optimization. Now that you have your keywords, keyword phrases and a good list of sites to link to and to get links from, the task becomes writing your content to incorporate them and setting up your web pages so that they are search engine friendly. You will need to understand HTML to optimize your page properly for the search engines. If you are new to HTML, you can get up to speed with our Interactive HTML Tutorial for Beginners. Plan Out Your Content Each page on your website should focus on one to three main keywords or keyword phrases. If you have 120 keyword or keyword phrases, try to organize these into 25 to 30 pages. Each of these pages should be named with it's main keyword. As an example, if your page keyword is "web design", you will name the page webdesign.html or web-design.html. Organize your list of pages into a site map. A good way to do this is with post-it notes with the name of each page on it. What you are doing is working out the best way to map out your site's navigation to make it easy for visitors to find your web pages. Write Your Content On each page, start with a title that uses the main keyword for the page. Search engines seem to favor pages that are 200 - 250 words although there is no real evidence that they have a problem with longer pages. Remember that you are NOT writing for a search engine. You are writing for people. So make sure that your pages are interesting and informative. Pepper your keywords throughout the page in a natural way. Some search engines give more weight to the keywords found in the first 200 - 250 words in on a page. Each search engine is different, but a guideline is a keyword density between 3 and 7% for your main keyword, slightly less for your other keywords. Here is a good tool you can use to check the keyword density percentages for your web pages: Add Your Images People enjoy images on a web page. Make sure that they make sense with your web page. When you add images, you should also add the alternative text (alt tag) for each image. Use your keywords in the alternative text too, but don't overdo it. Be sure to optimize your images by saving them at a level of compression where their file size is as small as possible while still giving a good quality display. Make sure that you set the width and height for each image. Do not resize large images by using the width and height settings. Actually change their size with a graphics editor. Add Your Links If you have links in your page, use some of your keywords in the link text. Again, don't overdo this. Try to use links that go to other pages that are related to the page you are working on or to other web sites that are related. Edit Your Meta Tags Meta tags are in the <head> section of your web page. The first and most important meta tag is the title tag. It looks like this: <title>Interactive HTML Tutorial - The Basics</title> The title is what the search engines will use on their results page. It also appears in the top left hand corner of your visitor's browser. The title meta tag should contain your main keyword. You can also just insert the title of your web page. The title tag should be between 10-60 characters or 6 or 7 words in length. The search engine will not show a longer title, but will cut your title off whenever it runs out of characters to display. The meta description tag is not very important these days, but you should set it up correctly anyway. There are some directories and search engines that still use it, but most don't. It is in the header section and looks like this: <meta name="description" content="Search Engine Marketing Basics"> The description tag is a very brief summary of what is on the web page, no more than 200 characters. Try to use your keywords in it. Next, set up your meta keywords tag. It looks like this: <meta name="keywords" content="html, tutorial, html tutorial, web page, web site design"> The keyword tag should contain between 4 and 10 keywords. You should list them separated by commas. List the keywords for your web page. Every word in this tag should appear somewhere in your web page, or you might be penalized for including irrelevant keywords. Don't list your keyword or phrase more than once. That's called keyword stuffing and you can be penalized by a search engine for doing that. Make Your Home Page Your home page is both an introduction and an index for your enitre web site. A visitor should be able to tell what your web site is mainly about from reading your home page. You should try to use your most important key words on this page. Make a Site Map A site map is a list of links to of all of the pages on your websites. Visitors like them because they can find this quickly on your site. Search engines like them too. Testing and Revising Now that you have all your pages made, your home page set up and your site map made, its time to test your website and make sure that it is working properly. Check for the following:
Ask some of your friends or associates to test your site. Get feedback from them and revise to improve your site. Launch Your Site It's time to go live. Upload your site and make sure that everything is working fine online. Now roll up your sleeves and start submitting your site to key directories. Keep building up your links until you have a really popular and successful site. Good luck! |