Meta Tags help optimize your web site rankings by Jennifer Schilling

Meta Tags help optimize your web site rankings by Jennifer Schilling

Are you working on getting your web site up onto the internet?

There are a few different elements you need to think about when first putting up your new web site. Starting with the basics and building from there is the best way to go. Optimizing your web site and getting it ready for the Internet World to see is what you need to concentrate on first. Here are a few helpful hints to get you on your way to success.

When optimizing your web site and making sure it is ready for the search engines to crawl frequently, there are a few key areas that you need to pay attention to. The three main fundamentals for creating successful search engine optimization are Link popularity, Meta tag creation and optimizing your web site. We will specifically concentrate on creating meta tags to help optimize any web site.

What is a Meta Tag?

A meta tag can be found in the "html code" within a web page. Each meta tag is used by the search engines to determine what your web pages are about. The meta tag Information provides the "essential guts" of your website page. Your Web site "Title and Description" Tags are an essential part of this meta tag creation. The "Title, Description and Headline" Tags can be the first thing any web searcher will see when they do a search on the internet.

Since first impressions are everything, the importance on making "the Title, Description and Headline" meta tags readable, relevant, attractive and properly optimized are absolutely essential. The true key is not to over optimize because you are likely to be banned entirely from the search engines if you choose to do so.

What happens when the search engines crawl your web site?

Now that you have set up your meta information, the search engines will crawl your web site and use this essential information as the brochure to your web site. When a search engine crawls your site, it determines the relevance of this meta information compared to the content on your page. The keyword Frequency on your web site should appear as much as possible on a page without being considered as something that sticks out like a sore thumb. If this does occur, you may be penalized as spamming.

What is key word frequency?

Keyword Frequency describes how many times a keyword (or phrase) occurs on a page. The most simple example of keyword frequency is if your key word appeared on a web page 5 times in every 100 words viewed by an engine, then your keyword density would be 5/100 or 5%.

The real trick to ensure a good ranking on the search engines is to produce quality content-rich pages which make the keyword density climb higher. But repeating your main keyword phrases can be tricky because you must still ensure that any content on your site isn't compromised by your search engine optimization effort, so as to not confuse your reader. If you can keep a reader coming back to visit your web site, you definitely know you have accomplished this task.

In conclusion, keyword frequency should match your meta information with the content on your pages. The search engines have changed dramatically so trying to trick them by spamming with only hurt or jeapardize your web site.

Don't try to spam the engines by submitting content-low pages full of keywords. You want to attract visitors to your site because of the good content your are providing to your readers. Take the time to optimize your site correctly so that you can get the most out of your web site rankings. When you have good content on your site, you will find those search engine rankings climbing to the top.

Good luck optimizing those web pages,

Jennifer Schilling

Copyright2004 Jennifer Schilling

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About the Author
Jennifer Schilling is a home business mentor. Come by and grab a F-R-E-E subscription today at:
http://www.internet-business-success.biz

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking by Suzanne Morrison

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking by Suzanne Morrison

With search engines like Google currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is becoming more and more difficult to get a top search engine ranking. Type in a popular search phrase such as "Internet Marketing" into Yahoo or Google and you will be returned over 8 million results!

Unless your website is in the first two or three pages, it is unlikely that you will receive many visitors from search engines.

So what should a webmaster do to give their website the best chance of ranking high in the search engines?

All search engines work slightly differently and have ever changing algorithms for ranking web pages, but these tips can be applied when planning, developing or marketing a website to help you reach that top page of search engine results.

(1) Choose your keywords carefully

It's extremely important to set aside time to research your keywords. It's best to do this in the planning stages, before developing your website, but many of us start a website without knowing a thing about how the search engines work, so you may find yourself doing this weeks or months later.

Try to choose phrases that are searched on frequently and if possible have a low number of competing websites.

To get an idea of the number of times a keyword is searched for per month, type a keyword into the box at

Overture Search Suggestion Tool

This will tell you how many times your keyword was searched on in the previous month (based on Overture's partner search engines) and give you a list of similar keywords.

Another useful tool to help you choose your keywords is Word Tracker. This tool will help you choose your keywords and give you a "KEI" for each set of keywords based on the popularity of the keyword (number of searches) and the amount of competition.

You can try this out for free on:

Wordtracker

If you manage to pick your keywords in the planning stages you may even be lucky enough to find a domain name that contains your keywords.

(2) Optimise your pages

Once you have decided on your keywords you will need to optimise your pages for those keywords. Here are a few tips.

- Ensure that the Title of your page contains your keywords.

- Mention your keywords inside the meta tags. Most search engines no longer use meta tags, but some make use of them so it is still worthwhile using these.

- Try to make sure that the first occurance of readable text on your page contains your keywords

- Ensure that your keywords are mentioned in the initial paragraph of your page

- Use your keywords throughout the text of your page - but be careful not to overdo this. Your page should still be readable by humans!

- Use your keywords between the headline tags on your page ("H1" tags or H2/H3 if H1 is too big)

- Occasionally bold or italicise your keywords

- Make sure that links pointing back to each page on your site contain the keywords for each page

- Give all your images an "ALT" tag and put your keywords in here too - again, don't overdo this

- Try to put some of your keywords in your outbound links

(3) Start Linking

One of the most important criteria in getting a good search engine ranking is the number of backlinks you have to your website from related websites.

Type in your chosen keywords to Yahoo or Google and take note of the top 3 sites returned to you.

Now go to this Link Popularity Tool and put the URLs of the top three sites into the linking tool, along the URL of your own site.

Have a look at the difference between your site and the top 3 sites and this will give you an idea of how many links you need in order to get a top search engine ranking for these keywords.

The best ways to get links back to your site are:

- By writing articles related to the subject of your website and getting them published on the internet

- Reciprocal Linking with other related websites

- Posting on newsgroups and forums that allow you to have a signature attached to your posting (with your uRL in it)

- Submitting your site to directories.

Try to make sure that the anchor text (clickable text) that links back to your site contains your keywords.

(4) Add Content Regularly

Another thing you may have noticed is that top ranking websites have lots of content.

Regularly updating your website and adding fresh content will also help your site to rank more highly in the search engines.

If you don't have time to create your own unique content there are plenty free articles available Just type "Free website content" into Google and you'll have your pick of the 18 million results that it returns to you!

To improve your ranking, follow steps 1 and 2 above and repeat steps 3 and 4 regularly.

You can check your progress on Yahoo and Google by using the free search engine ranking tools at the following sites:

Yahoo Search Rankings
Google Rankings

About the Author
Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster and owner of How to Start an Internet Business. To learn more about how to promote your website visit her Beginner's Guide to Internet Marketing

Optimizing Your Website's Design For Search Engines by Andrey Milyan

Optimizing Your Website's Design For Search Engines by Andrey Milyan

It is a well known fact that big search engines like Google are paying the most attention to the links that point back to your website. However, that does not mean that your website design does not matter. You should take a break from looking for link partners and invest some time in optimizing your website's design; it will pay of in the long run. Below you will find some tips on how to optimize your layout in order for search engine spiders to crawl your website correctly.

Use of images in search engine optimization process.

The most important thing to understand about search engines' spiders is that they can only read text. That means that whatever text you have inside the image will not be read by any spider. Of course, website without images will be boring to look at but be careful not to put important text inside the image. It is relatively easy to surround your body text with images to make it look as if the text is part of an image without hurting your search engine ranking chances. Discuss these things with your web designer.

Create meta tags.

Creating meta tags is the next step toward successful search engine optimization. Meta tags are designed to give search engine spider in idea about your website before it actually crawls the body of the page itself. Meta data gives the spider title of your page, short description and the keywords that are relevant to that page. Notice that the word "page" is used here; spiders look at each page of your website separately. Here are some examples and explanations on meta tags:

SEMBooster.com




TITLE - that's the title of your page. Do not make it too long and don't try to put too many keywords in it. Never the less, you should have 1-2 of your major keywords in the title.

DESCRIPTION - that's the description of you page. It should be 1-2 sentences and should make sense because search engines like Google use it when displaying your listing, along with title tag.

KEYWORDS - that's the keywords that relate to your website. Make sure you put keywords that have been used in the body of you page. If you put keywords that are nowhere to be found on your page some search engines might penalize for it and filter out your website.

Use style sheets.

Today using style sheets or CSS is a common practice but you still better make sure your website is using one. Style sheets help you clean up your code and remove font tags that might cause problems with spiders. In the past webmasters filled pages with tons of keywords in the tiny font size and therefore search engines started to penalize for it. Using CSS ensures that all text is of the same size as well as spider is concerned; visually all fonts will look different. Now webmasters are even building the whole sites on CSS.

Image alt tags.

Image alt tags are an important part of your website optimization. Image alt tag contains text that you see when moving your mouse over the image. It is also the text that is used to describe an image if your website's visitor has images disabled. Because search engine spiders can't read text inside the image, it reads alt tag as a way to understand what the image is about. It seems that search engines are not penalizing for stuffing alt tags with keywords but be careful not to overdue it. Here is how it looks:



H tags.

H tags or headings have been known to increase website ranking for a while now. But is it really so? We have strong reasons to believe that h tags (mostly H1 tag) do not get you better ranking. They are, however, a great way to organize content of your page so it is not very surprising that some webmaster still think they can bring better ranking. Also, using keywords in H tags will increase your keyword density. So by increasing your keyword density and organizing your content, you can actually get better ranking but it is not thanks to h tags. There are a lot of website owners that complain that H tags are difficult to work with. Our advice to this is: "Don't use them if you have no place to put them or if you don't have much content to organize." There are plenty of high ranking websites that don't use H tags at all.

Your website's navigation.

Make sure it's crawlable. People often build a website but soon realize that search engine spider does not go any farther then index page. Even though you have links to most of your pages from the home page spiders might still have difficulty indexing your pages. There are several reasons why this happens:

Your website is using JavaScript navigation menu. If you have drop down menus in your navigation then it is surely designed in JavaScript. JavaScript is not crawlable by search engine spiders, therefore spider cannot index your other pages. There are several ways to fix this problem. Try adding simple text links to your major pages at the bottom of your home page so that spider can move through your website easier. Another way to solve the problem is to create a site map and connect it to your home page with text link. This will drastically improve spider's ability to spider your website.
Your website is using Flash navigation menu. While images can at least be linked to other pages, Flash navigation is not crawlable at all. Use the same solutions that were mentioned in number one.
Check your meta tags. It is possible that you are using robots tag which might be blocking the spider. Make sure that if you have one either remove it (you don't really need it, spiders will still index and then follow to other pages on your website) or put INDEX, FOLLOW inside the tag. It should look like this:



Site Map.

Site map is a very useful thing for an website. It can benefit your website in several ways. First, it will make your website much easier to index; as a general rule search engine spiders index pages much faster when you have a site map. Site map is absolutely necessary if your website is using JavaScript or Flash navigation and you don't want to get rid of it.

Site map will also help your visitors navigate your website. Some of the pages they might be looking for a berried deep in your navigation structure and site map makes them much more accessible for everyone.

In you site map you should simply place text links to all of your pages; you can organize them however you want, even group them if you like. In the link anchor text use keywords that are relative to that page, it will help spiders identify them correctly.
About the Author
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