SEARCH ENGINE WORD OPTIMIZATION

[x2k]

Here's something I wrote to someone once about optimising your website for search engines, it doesn't cover everything which search engines pick up on but it provides a few basic techniques which should be used. Also it's not been written greatly so let me know if something is not explain clearly and I'll try and make it clearer, I'll also try to add to it when I got a bit more time...

 

 

SEARCH ENGINE WORD OPTIMIZATION

Regardless of what keywords you enter into search engine websites these will not really make any impact on where you get listed unless the content of the website contains these words/phrases, also the more times they appear in the page and the nearer they are to the top of the page the better. Basically you've got to write content for the website with the words you want people to search for while still making it look like legitmate content (which it has to be because your customers will be reading it). Obviously the front page is the most important but it's worth doing as many different pages as possible because it gives you more possibilities and a wider selection of search terms.

 

META TAGS

These are quite important, but you really need to make sure you get these right, because if you don't put keywords and descriptions which appear in the content then the search engines think your lying and this counts against you. Also even though your keywords might be relevent if they don't appear in the page it's no good because these search engines don't know that the word DJ is related to Music or Bulb is related to Light.

 

There's quite a good tool for working out what to put in you meta tags here

 

http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

 

You basically enter the address of a page and it tells you how good your meta

tags are and what are the most frequent words on the page (the ones which should be in the meta tags but obviously not words like THE or AND).

 

EXTERNAL LINKS

These are on of the main contributers to your search engine ranking but it's very hard to get this rating up, basically you need to get other website to link to you, the thing is the text of the link are words which count towards you,

 

e.g. if a link is set up like so

 

"To visit the Digital Vertigo click here"

 

(where "click here" is the actual link) the the words "click here" will be counted towards you, a much better way to do it might be to have a link like so

 

"For scratching and technical advice visit Digital Vertigo"

 

(where "Digital Vertigo" is the link).

 

In the case of using images as the link the ALT tags is where the keywords are got from e.g.

 

<a href="http://www.digitalvertigo.co.uk/"><img src="image.jpg" alt="Digital Vertigo" /></a>

 

Also use the same techniques for internal links within your site as this will contribute to the relevency of page you are linking to.