Optimize Your Web Site To Rank Higher in Search Engines

So you just finished creating that brilliant web site or page and you wait weeks only to find that no one knows its there.  You search the search engines like Google , Yahoo , and Alta Vista and find no reference to your page.  That might be because you never finished the web site or page.  The final act every webmaster must do is optimize your web page or site for the search engines.  Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a bit of an art but more just careful attention to details.  The best part is that if you follow the steps below you'll b able to analyze your competition on the search engines and simply copy their techniques.  Unlike most trade secrets  much of search engine optimization is done is right out in the open because you can simply use the view source command in your web browser to see what the successful web sites did to optimize their web sites and pages for the search engines. 

Optimizing Meta Tags For Search Engines

Begin with your meta tags.  The first two are the most important and these are the <title> and <description> meta tags.  If you do a search on your most important keywords notice the <title> meta tags that your top competitors use.  To see this go to their web page and right click then choose view source.  The key here is to make your title and description more relevant to your keywords on your page than the competition.  General guidelines would include a title no longer than 80 characters and a description not much longer than 80 characters.  Look at the section of code below to see an example of these tags.

Consider your key word density. 

Density is the number of times your keywords occur vs the total number of words in your web page.  After creating your page revisit your text and labels under your pictures.  Try and use your key words as much as possible.  Any time you refer to something as it and the and their change this to include the subject or keywords you are referring to.  Remember the fewer words that don’t relate to your keywords and the more of your key words in your page the better.  With this in mind don’t just stuff your page so its no fun to read.  Just be sure that non keyword inclusive sentences add to the page and if not delete them.

Use ALT tag on all your pictures.  As I mentioned earlier, don’t stuff your text with keywords and make your page no fun to read.  When you’ve done your best there visit each picture and give each a label in the form of an ALT tag.  Try to use your keywords in these labels as it counts towards your density.  Many web editors such as front page allow this to be done with a simple right click and picture properties choice.

Make sure your hyperlinks in your page use keywords as well.  If you have a link back to your home page don’t call the link home, call the link the name of your page which hopefully have your valuable keywords in it.  If you are linking to related sites be sure those links titles also have keywords in them as it all goes towards your density.

Lastly run your page through a meta tag analyzer such as the one at http://www.widexl.com  This will grade your meta tags as well as show you your keyword density.  This will tell you whether you are on the right track in your use of keywords.

The combination of all these steps should get you started to creating web pages that rank well in the search engines.

The next meta tag to consider is the keywords meta tag.  This is no longer as important as the title and description tags due to spamming of search engines in the past.  Still it’s a good idea to add your keywords and separate them by comas.  Key phrases such as “class action lawsuit” should be all one phrase as opposed to three words separated by commas.  Keep in mind the keywords you want to build to and use the commas to separate out words from phrases.  Try not to duplicate words as well.