Optimise your Site for the Search Engines Pt
1
Go directly to Part
2
Listed here you will find the five of the most important points
to remember when optimising your site and individual pages
for the search engines.
If you optimise your pages by working through these points
one by one you will see a significant rise in your search engine
rankings.
1: Buy the right Domain names !
The best way to increase your rankings in the SE's(Search Engines) and
for the least amount of effort is to choose the right domain name for
your site from the start. The SE's give a domain name the
highest prominence and score when issuing a ranking. So it's
a major priority to have your domain name contain keywords relevant
to your site content.
The other point to remember is that domain
names can have up to 67 characters in them including
the extension(.com, .net etc) now as opposed to the original
23. So you can load your domain name with a number of keywords
to boost your ranking, just remember to use a hyphen to
separate them out.
This also means that if a really great domain
name has gone you can get something close and in fact better
because you could simply add another keyword. Eg say exercise-equipment.com
wasn't available, I could register best-exercise equipment.com
or cheap-exercise-equipment.com.
I have a number of clients using this technique
very successfully, and of course if you check out the address
bar above this very site does the same thing. ;-)
For the cheapest domain names online with the
best control panel online try www.123-reg.co.uk I
highly recommend these guys I've used them for years now
and register all my own and my clients domains through them.
2: Choose the right Title for your
page.
The title of your page is what visitors will see across the top of their
browsers when they visit your site. It's important that each of your
site pages is titled differently to distinguish them from each other
and to tie in with the content of the page.
This is also the title of your listing when
your site is returned in the results of a Search Engine.
This is probably the second most important
thing to get right after choosing your domain name. If your
domain name has good keywords then repeat these keywords
in the title of your page, add a hyphen and then add your
keyword rich title for that page. So going back to the example
above exercise-equipment.com your title should probably be
along the lines of -
Best Exercise Equipment - Best, Cheap,
New and Used Exercise Equipment.
Notice how I get exercise equipment in there
twice, first as the name of the site and then as a description
of the page. The capitalising of the main words within the
title will help your page stand out in the results a little.
Don't be tempted capitalise all your letters this looks cheap
and some directory's will not list your page with a title
in this state.
I've mentioned keywords a fare bit already
and I should probably say jump down to No5 for a better idea
of what they are and how to use them.
3: Use the H1 tag on the, on page,
title/heading of your page.
A H1 tag is the heading text tag in HTML. SE's give this tag more relevancy
as it's generally used for the title of a page eg h1 best exercise
equipment /h1.
That 's the actual on page title and not the browser title.
If you try this out you'll find that it looks
pretty ugly, with lots of space around it and much to chunky
for a nice looking site.
So here's a trick you can use
to keep the H1 tag but have the text appear as normal. *whisper
use css style sheets to shrink the text back to size. Check
the title of this page 'Web site optimisation Part1'
that's a H1 tag that's been fixed. Big difference isn't there.
This is a little known but very useful secret.
;-)
Here's the code to do the trick, drop it into
your css document or place it 'style' tags at the head of
your code -
h1 {font-size: 13px; margin: 0px;}
Its that simple, play around with the font-size
until it's in proportion to the rest of your page.
Remember it's the title of your page and should stand out a little from
the rest of the text.
4: Meta tags are still useful. Choosing
keywords.
Not as important as they once were due to abuse. But still used by a
number of well known search engines, the new Yahoo search checks them
as does the MSN search. But Google gives them little relevance. Which
means it's still important to use them to cover all your bases.
Essentially the meta tags you should be using
when targeting the search engines are keywords, description
and robots.
Keywords should also contain keyphrases and
list keywords/keyphrases relevant to the page they appear
in. There are two ways to list your keywords/keyphrases.
Either with commas separating them or without. The benefit
to not using commas is that the keywords side by side can
also be read as keyphrases by the SE's. Where as a comma
separates everything out. So not using commas allows for
some odd combinations to be picked up by the SE's.
meta name="keywords" content=" best
exercise equipment cheap home gym equipment health good exercise
order online"
That's just an example off the top of my head
I haven't researched the words as I normally would, you should
also have much more in there around 20-30 words at least.
Notice again I've started of with 'best exercise equipment'
to echo and boost the use of that phrase elsewhere as discussed
above.
The description is self explanatory again and
it's a good move to echo the title of the page and fill it
out a little so -
meta name="description" content="best
exercise equipment - best, cheap, new and used exercise equipment
reviewed and available to order online"
The robots tag is very simple and is not strictly
necessary but useful. What it does is tell the visiting SE
spiders what to do when it comes to listing your site. Spiders
are the little programs that crawl the web gathering info
on websites for the SE's. You can also use something called
a robots.txt file to further control the spiders, but I won't
go into that here since its not strictly necessary and the
robots tag is enough for our aims at the moment.
Here's an example -
meta name="robots" content ="index, follow"
With this we're telling the spider/robot to
follow all the links when visiting this page.
If you have a members area or an admin area on your site that you don't
want listed in the SE's, or any other pages you want to keep to yourself
then you can use this -
meta name="robots" content ="index,no
follow"
A well known and very useful tool for checking
out what search words people are using on the SE's is Wordtracker.
When you know what people are searching for you know what
keywords and keyphrases you should be weaving into your website.
This tool is used by all the online Marketing experts. Another
tool is the Overture
suggestion tool which will list the number of times a
word or phrase has been searched for on the Overture engine
over the previous month. A handy tool that will query Overture
directly from your desktop and store all results of your
keyword searches is Good
Keywords.
For a more extensive list of keyword resources try my keyword
research page.
5: Body text Keyword/Keyphrases and
bold text.
This is very much where the focus is when it comes to keywords
and keyphrases. Generally it makes sense the more focused your body text
is on what your page is about the better you will get ranked. In those
terms everyone's a winner. You get better listing and your content is
more relevant in order to achieve that. Does that make sense ? let me
clarify.
Returning to our examples again our site is
called exercise-equipment.com
We've already used the phrase 'exercise equipment' in our domain name,
page title, on page title and in our meta tags.
If we now add this same phrase to the main text of our page a number
of times ideally near the top within the first paragraph we'll boost
our ranking in the SE's yet again.
Note you should try to make the phrase fit
the text and not just cram it in there. It's also important
not to over do it. As it is with the other techniques described
in this article. You can get your site dropped and even barred
from the SE's if it's seen to be 'spamming' them by abusing
these techniques. So tread carefully and try not to be tempted
to over do it.
Back to the keywords/keyphrases, there's a
further twist to this if we also make the body text 'exercise
equipment' bold we'll score again in the SE's since text
in bold is seen as being more important and again more relevant.
;-) The side benefit is that it breaks up the text a little
on the page too for our site visitors and makes the page
a little more interesting and easier to read.
Continue to Part
2 ►
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