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Meta
Tags Optimisation Tutorial
There a millions of web sites on the
Internet, with 1000's more being added every day.
One of the best ways of finding any of these web sites is by
using search engines, but you type anything into a search engine
you are likely to get 1000's of search results, and how many
times do you look beyond the second page of search results? Not
very often I guess.
Well what you need to do is to try and get your web site listed
as high as possible in the results and there are a number of
things you can do to help.
Page Title
Make sure each page on your web site has a title in the head of
the document. Many search engines use the title of the web page
as the link to your site, so it is important that your title be
as relevant and descriptive as possible.
To see how many Untitled Documents there are out there, all you
need to do is type Untitled Document
into a search on
Google, when I tried it returned 2,590,000 search results.
When you look at the pages found, Untitled
Document, is not going to make you want to visit that
page.
It is best to use the title for your page that describes the
content of your page as much as possible in the most descriptive
way. For example, if you were looking for a page that sells
Crystal Wine Glasses and the search engine title for the page
said Glasses it could mean the page contained anything from
Sunglasses to Beer Glasses.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are one of the most important parts of a web page when
it is indexed by a search engine.
Meta tags are used by almost all search engines to index your
page and contain items such as page description and keywords.
The description meta tag is very often used by a search engine
to display a sort description of what your web page contains.
Some search engines look at the keywords entered into the
keywords meta tag and will use this to display your page in the
search results if it is one of the words used in the search
criteria.
For more information on Meta Tags look at the
Meta Tags Optimisation Tutorial.
Page Content
A number of search engines will index the first few lines of
your web page, so try to make a the first few lines as
descriptive as possible.
Some search engines will even index your entire page. To try and
trick search engines some people enter hundreds of keywords into
the bottom of the page but in the same colour as the background
so they can't be seen by the user, but they can by the search
engine spider. This is known as spamming and many search engines
are clever enough these days to see this and will actually put
your site lower in the listings or black list it altogether.
Hyperlinks
Try to place as many descriptive text links in your homepage to
other relevant pages in your site as possible as search engines
will use these links to index the other pages on your site.
Images
Most sites these days contain images, so it is important that
you use the alt tag on any images to try and describe as much as
possible what the image is of. Not only will this help index
your site better but it will also help those visitors to your
site who are visually impaired.
Where possible try not to use images that contain text as what
maybe easily visible to you won't be able to be indexed by a
search engine.
Links to Your Site
Many search engines, including Google, will return your web site
higher in search results by the amount of web sites that link to
your site, also the higher the profile of the site that links to
yours, the higher your listing is in search results again.
With this in mind it is worth searching the Internet for other
web sites on the same topic as your own. Many of these sites
will have link pages and even if they don't its worth asking the
web site owner if they could link to your web site.
The more links to your site the better as I find many sites get
more visitors from other sites linking to them than come through
search engines anyway.
Sites Using Frames
Frames tend to cause search engine spiders allot of problems
when indexing your site as many won't recognise the document
that opens up your frames and so wont index your pages.
To help over come this problem place your main homepage into the
noframes part of the document that opens all your frames. The
noframes part of the page is for those browsers that can't
handle frames, but as most nowadays do your web site visitors
will never see what is in this part of the document.
To help index other pages on your site it is also worth placing
links in the noframes part of the document as this will allow
the search engine spider to find other pages on your site and
index them.
Frames do cause allot of problems and not just when indexing
your site, what happens if someone clicks onto a link which
takes them into only one frame on your site, they may not be
able to view any navigation controls and so will not be able to
go to other parts of your site. I would recommend, where
possible not to use a frames on your site. |