• Choosing Keywords (very important)

    Chosing the right keywords for visitors to find you under in the search engines is very important. Make lists of keywords and them combine them into two or three word phrases. Not a minute will be wasted on this effort. It is that important!

    Important things to consider when choosing keywords:

  • Concepts: Include concept keywords such as "webmaster resources" if that's what you sell, but also try and be specific enough so that its not too broad.

  • Phrases: Many people will likely use multiple word phrases to find you particularly when single words do not provide adequate scope for the search. Make a list of 2-3 word phrases people are likely to search for. When placing keywords on your page, make sure you always include them in a phrase that the visitor might use.

  • Case Sensitivity and Plurals:It is a good idea to make sure you have at least some of the keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if the user might search that way and that same sort of thing can be said for plurals.

  • Bad Spelling Can be Good: Search engines don't have spell checkers and not all people can spell well. An example could be diabetes and diabeties or vegetarian and vegatarian. Look for obvious mistakes people are likely to make and then incorporate some of them into one of your pages (this would be a good use of an HTML comment <!--->).

  • Test Keywords: A good thing to do is to see how many other pages match the keywords people would likely search on to find you. The fewer matches found for your search, the easier it will be to get your name up near the top. If your keywords bring up a lot of pages that your potential visitors would have no interest in anyway, then you could be the only site of quality, that appears near the top of that search. There may be phrases that people are likely to search for which are much easier to achieve good rankings on than more common words and phrases.

    Please bookmark this page now before you rush off checking your keywords. Thanks.

      Here's 3 pretty Cool Ideas for finding suitable keywords we used:

    1. Try looking for keyword suggestions at GoTo.com - select the option "get Listed on GoTo" in the lower left hand corner, then select "Client Tool Kit" located in the logo area at the top of the page, and then select "Search Term Suggestion List" - a pop up window will appear. Try your keywords in there for a count of related searches.

    2. Try looking at Weekly Search Engine Keyword Statistics - interesting.

    3. A freeware downloadable product called Word Market - very interesting.

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  • META Tags

    META Tags are the most basic for manipulating the search engines. Some search engines will use these META Tags to index web content and give this more weight than the actual content of the page.

    There are two main META Tags recognized by the search engines: "description" and "keywords". These tags need to be placed in the "head" section of your html document. That is they need to reside between <head> and </head>.

    Use the following syntax:

    <meta name="description" content="Write your description here">

    and:

    <meta name="keywords" content="Write your keywords here">

    Some engines will look for agreement between the "description", "keyword", "title" and body text.
    So, try to use the same keywords in each field.

    For example:

    <head>
    <title>How To Make Your Web Site Search Engine Friendly</title>
    <meta name="description" content="This site teaches you how to make your web site search engine friendly. How to instruction topics cover web page design optimization, choosing keywords, and the use of META Tags.">
    <meta name="keywords" content="being found in search engines, web page design optimization, choosing good keywords, using meta tags, meta, META, Meta, meta tags, Meta Tags, META TAGS, keywords, KEYWORDS, Keywords, description, DESCRIPTION, Description, title, TITLE, Title, content, Content, CONTENT, html, HTML, Html"> </head>

    META tags can control what appears as the summary of your web page and will be displayed after the title of your document in the index listing. The content of the description should clearly convey what one can expect to find when linking to your site. Remember that while some search engines do take these keywords into account when indexing your page, they are still going to index the entire contents of your page.

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  • Page Design Optimization

  • Keywords: Don't repeat keywords excessively. Some search engines are beginning to filter out sites that repeat words too much. What is excessive? Some say 2 to 5 times, others say 6 to 7 times. So try to let the content speak for itself.

  • Use ALT tags especially if your site contains multiple photos or graphic-image maps at the top of your home page. Some search engines will take into account the text within an ALT tag when creating your site's description and keywords. Also, many people surf the net with their Auto Load Images option turned off, and the ALT tags provide a description of the graphic they can not see.

  • Frames: Search engine spiders will not follow links that are in frames. This means that if your opening page is created with frames, then the spider will find absolutely nothing else on your site. Don't use them.

  • Submit Each Page? Most engines will not only index your main page but will also seek out links to your other pages to index. They'll move down one or more levels down the site tree. Therefore, it's not always necessary to submit each page individually to those engines. However, if you create secondary pages that link to your home page but not the other way, you'll need to submit those pages manually.

  • Link to Home Page: Since many visitors will find random pages in your site, always include a link back to your home page.

  • First Few Lines: Most search engines will display the first few lines of text from the page it finds to the user. The user will then scan these lines to determine if it's what they're looking for. You need to say something to encourage the user to click on your site over the others listed. Try to as clearly as possible describe the contents of that page or your site in those first few lines!

  • Make Sure Everything is Ready First. Since many engines take weeks to index a page, you might want to jump the gun on a new site and submit it before you've got all the pages done. Be careful about this.

  • Spamming: Some engines are reported to have started watching for people submitting too many pages at once. They sometimes limit you on how many you can submit per day or week. They may also start looking for people submitting too many similar pages and will ban sites that they feel are abusing the system. Therefore, its always best to proceed with caution and submit only as many variations of a page as absolutely necessary to achieve your goal. If you keep it to one regular page and one optimized summary page for each product/service then you should not have any problems. Also, you should space out submissions when possible (perhaps once a week). See the article on spamming the search engines.

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    • Tips
    Search Engine Tactics the only FREE e-book ever to receive ZDNet's coveted 5 star rating.

  • FREE Trial - Download - TagGen will increase your search engine ranking by placing meta tags into your HTML documents.

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    • Resources
  • Submit your site to the 10 top Search Engines

    Free Top Ten Search Engine Submission!

    Excite What-u-Seek WebCrawler NetFind Lycos
    InfoSeek Alta Vista Hot Bot Goto Northern Light
    Site Title URL
    Name Email
    Click here for Free Advertising

    		 Find out how to insert this at your website!

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