Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Author: Spencer J Casey

 

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:00:00 CST – What are some of the most basic things you can do to improve your website’s marketing strategy? The most inexpensive approach is to take advantage of free search engine submissions. However, you need to do some basic site preparation BEFORE a search engine robot indexes your website. Within this article you will learn how to optimize your individual web pages to improve and more accurately advertise your website.

Step 1 – Ensure each page within your website has a title.


Within the code of your individual webpage’s, you need to place a title tag within the header sub-section. The <head></head> tags are located at the top of your webpage. Below is an example of the code.

<head>
<Title>Casey Designs - Web Hosting, Development, E-mail, Marketing Services</Title>
</head>

Each page, within your website, should have a unique title. Do not duplicate titles. The title should be keyword-rich, and accurately describe the pages content. The page title will show up at the top of the web browser, when visiting potential customers visit your website.



In addition, most search engine will display your title, when displaying search results. In this example, if you search www.bing.com for Casey Designs, it will list my page title and hyperlink to my website.



Step 2 – Write a Description Meta Tag

Along with the title tags, you should also include a description meta tag. The description meta tag should accurately describe the contents within the page. Below is an example of the code:

<head>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Provides Windows Web Hosting, Web Development, Business Class E-mail Services, Website Marketing Solutions, and Domains."/>
<Title>Casey Designs - Web Hosting, Development, E-mail, Marketing Services</Title>
</head>

Once again, you want to use keywords and phrases that are relevant and interesting. The description meta tag is often used by search engines to describe your webpage. With that in mind, you want write your description in such a way to entice users to want to click on your website title and visit your site when displayed within search results. See how your meta tag description is utilized by search:



Step 3 – Write a Keyword Meta Tag

This step is not required by most search engines. However it is a very good way to organize your website, by identifying critical keywords that you feel best describe the content of the page. These keywords should be repeated within your website, featured as header tags, internal hyperlinks, and be positioned within the first paragraph of your body text.  This helps clearly identify what your page is all about.

<head>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Provides Windows Web Hosting, Web Development, Business Class E-mail Services, Website Marketing Solutions, and Domains."/>
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Web Hosting, Web Development, Business Class E-mail Services, Webmail, Domain Registration, Search Engine Optimization, Website Marketing, Website Analytics, Mobile E-mail"/>
<Title>Casey Designs - Web Hosting, Development, E-mail, Marketing Services</Title>
</head>

If you need help identifying keywords, consider using a free keyword suggestion tool.

Conclusion

When search engines spider your website, they are trying to understand how to index and position your pages. It is critical to develop a common thread between your title, meta description, meta keywords, and the information/content displayed on the page. A good search engine optimization tool is the keyword cloud report. This tool will give you a visual depiction of the keywords on your website, and the number of times you list them. Obviously, you want your primary keywords listed most frequently.

As a webmaster you should review your website and focus on optimizing your pages. Those who take the time to accurately list titles and descriptions, will benefit from better indexed pages and search results.   The next step would be to organize your website content, and then add your website to bing, google, and yahoo.



 

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