1. Register
a good domain name
which reflects what your site is about. Even if
you are an established business, don't register
www.FredJones.com if you make widgets.
Rather, you want to register something like
www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire
confidence in people looking for quality widgets
who would not necessarily have heard of Fred
Jones the widget-maker.
Australian
Domains
If your clients are within Australia it is
better to have a .au address. Most search
engines have the facility to narrow the search
to sites within a Country. Preference is given
to the .au suffix in the search results
displayed.
2. Name your page URLs based on
reasons similar to the above, except you can be
more specific. Search engines like to know what
your page is about.
Name a page
after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a
service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on
one of the salės pages.
3. The text in the title tag
is
crucial in letting search engines know what each
page is about. Put your important keyphrases in
your title tags, (guess what people would type
in when they are looking for your
product/services)
Make these
title tags different and specific for each page.
For example,
"Widgets and After Salės Widget Services".
Whatever you do, don't call the home page
"Index", but treat it almost as a
mini-description.
4. The other tags (at the top of the html
page) between the two "head" tags are not as
important as the title tag, but the
description tag is still used by some search
engines in displaying what you would like web
users to see when they scroll down a page of
search results. Some search engines don't use
the description tag at all; others, like Google,
sometimes use part of it together with part of
the main body text surrounding prominent
keywords on your page.
So you may as
well treat the description tag seriously; make
it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as
comprehensive as possible in the short space
allowed. Make sure you have your popular
keywords included within your description tag.
The Alt tag is used for a very short
description of an image or graphic file, and is
what is displayed if you allow your mouse
pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it
is not considered important for search engines.
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The Comment tag
is never displayed on the body page, and is used
by coders and designers as an instruction or
reminder to themselves about what that section
of html coding should be doing; in the past,
some webmasters in their quest for website
promotion and search engine ranking used to
stuff keywords in the comments tags, but today
it is generally acknowledged that the main
search engines pay little or no attention to
these.
5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its
own preference as to how many times a keyword
phrase appears on the page in order to signify
the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other
words, in order to help the search engine
understand what the page is about).
Around 5 to
8 per cent is a rough guide as to the
optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it
will be seen as sp@m or keyword-stuffing. Also
use your keywords in the heading tags H1 and H2.
There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful
whether search engines bother with that, as it
is perceived as less prominent on the page,
therefore less relevant to what the page is
about.
6. Don't forget good linking in
your website marketing. Search engines will
judge the importance of your web pages to some
extent on the number and quality of incoming
links from other sites.
Try to obtain
as many links to your site as soon as possible.
Ask friends and webmasters with sites on similar
themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a
link back. These sites should not be in
competition with yours, but should be similarly
themed. You may occasionally be asked by other
webmasters if they can link to your site. If
this is so then have a look at their site; make
sure that their site is relevant, that it has at
least some PageRank, and that it just "feels"
good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects
or unexpected popups. You don't want to be
associated with a "bad neighborhood"!
7. Make sure that important keywords are
included in the anchor text within
inbound links from other sites. This is crucial
to search engines when they try to figure out
the relevance and importance of your pages.
The inbound
link from the other site should take the form of
something like this (I'm using normal brackets
instead of angle brackets so as not to use
compromising html):
(A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")your
important keywords included here(/A).
You should
definitely avoid something like (A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")click
here(/A), which tells search engines nothing
except that your site is about "click here". Be
careful! |
