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Maximizing Results
Page Titles
One of the most important aspects for increasing search rankings in any of the
search engines is to have a well-written, keyword-loaded page title for EACH of
the pages you submit.
The title is often the most important factor in determining relevancy to what
the user searched for.
Titles are also often what the engines use as the link in their list of
matches, making it the first thing a user reads when presented with a list of
appropriate search matches. Therefore, titles should generally contain the your
site¡¯s name, the product or service offering, and be loaded with keywords which
a user may search under if he or she was not familiar with your products.
For example, a bad title for the Sweet Scents shopping page would be:
<title>Sweet Scents</title>
or even worse:
<title>http://www.sweetscents.com/products.html</title>
The latter is often the default title given to a page if no <title> tag is
added inside the <head> of a web page. A slightly better title would be:
<title>Sweet Scents Perfume and Fragrance</title>
This would include several keywords which you would like the search engines to
pick up on. However, remembering that web users will see the title at the top
of their browser, and as the link on the engine¡¯s page of search matches, it is
important to make the title more readable and interesting. A good title for
Joe¡¯s home page would be:
<title>Sweet Scents Perfume and Fragrance: Perfume for Teens, Fragrance
for the Young and the Young Once</title>
This title is keyword-loaded, easy to read and understand, and will stand out
in the list of others even if it is not the top search return.
It is important to note that the complete title may not be visible at the top
of the browser, or on the search engine results page. It can be useful to use
longer titles which contain many key search terms, but be sure to include the
most important aspects of the title first.
The key to using titles effectively to increase search rankings is to envision
what search terms a user, without knowledge of your products, would be using.
Make a list of appropriate keywords, choose several which you feel or know to
be the most likely to be searched under, and include them in a natural format
in the title. Save other keywords for use with meta tags.
Meta Keywords and Descriptions
(meta tags)
Many search engines use meta tags to determine what a page¡¯s relevancy is to
keyword searches, and what information the page contains. However, in the past,
many web site designers, believing they could beat the system by loading up
their pages with keywords in meta tags, have reduced the search engines¡¯
reliance on them. They are still an important part of designing a high-ranking
site, but are not a panacea.
There are two main types of meta tags, which again are included in the
<head> of each page, generally after the <title>.
Front Page generally places the <title> tag after the <meta>
tag, at the end of the <head>, opposite of the Internet
standard. This may affect the relevancy boost a title usually gives a page,
depending on the search engine.
The two main types of meta tags are:
- Meta descriptions
- Meta keywords
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is used by many search engines as the description included
in a search results page under the link (which as previously mentioned is often
the page title). For example, when searching under Infoseek for Web Site
Promotion, the result displayed would be similar to the following:
WebPromote4U - An Insider¡¯s guide to web site promotion
WebPromote4U provides a variety of resources and tools to assist you in
promoting your web site effectively.
The underlined portion represents the page title and the link. The description
underneath is taken directly from the meta description, which is set as follows
(note the spaces and quotes):
<meta name="description" content="WebPromote4U provides a variety of
resources and tools to assist you in promoting your web site effectively.">
The description should include keywords, perhaps those which couldn¡¯t be fit
into the title, and read as an appropriate and interesting description to
search engine users.
Remember that the description is what is going to compel a user to click and
follow the link to your page.
Therefore it needs to read smoothly and pique their interest¡ªor show them they
have found what they are looking for.
Meta Keywords
The other meta tag that is also of great use is the list of keywords. This list
should include again your site¡¯s name, product name(s), and general search
keywords. Be sure to include those that are in your title and description, and
those that you couldn¡¯t fit.
In the past many web sites would include huge lists of commonly searched under
terms, often repeating them 10 or more times in order to increase their
relevancy. The search engines however, have caught on to this ¡®spamming¡¯ and
most will now delete pages or ENTIRE sites which do so. It is still generally
safe to repeat keywords, but never do so more than 3 times, and don¡¯t list them
consecutively. It is safer to list words in the format below:
¡®promotion, rankings, traffic, promotion, rankings, traffic, promotion,
rankings, traffic¡¯
rather than:
¡®promotion, promotion, promotion, rankings, rankings, rankings,
traffic, traffic, traffic¡¯.
Meta keywords tags can contain a large number of key search terms, but be sure
to list the most important near the top.
Some search engines will only categorize the first 150 or 200 characters of the
meta keywords. Statistically, most people search on two or more words to narrow
the scope of their search, so always include related keywords together whenever
possible.
It may also a good idea to include common misspellings (e.g. oppurtunity) and
to pluralize your keywords. The correct format for meta keywords is as follows:
<meta name="keywords" content="search engines, web site promotion,
increase traffic, search rankings, advertising">
Content Keyword Occurrence
Most search engines, and especially those which don¡¯t use meta tags
(such as Excite), also base relevancy ratings on the frequency of the
search terms within the web page, with some even comparing them to the terms
used in titles and descriptions. Although it is probably not necessary to
rewrite entire existing pages to load them with keywords (many of the
keywords should already exist within the page text¡ªotherwise your keywords are
not targeting what the site is really about), it should be kept in
mind when new pages are created.
Many search engines only look at the first few paragraphs of text, so a page
overview in the first paragraph generally helps relevancy for keywords it uses.
Other engines index the entire page, generally reducing the frequency of
keywords due to the larger amount of text. Even if a particular word is
repeated 8 times on a page, if the page contains 1,000 words, its frequency is
only 0.8%. Some engines may not even index that particular word, because of its
¡®low¡¯ frequency.
In general, short pages with few graphics will rank higher than longer pages or
pages containing many graphics.Heading Tags
When building web pages, many people overlook one of the more influential
elements to the way an engine scores the page: The HEADING tag. Headings are
the larger print, or subtitles on a page. Headings come in various sizes
represented by the HTML tags <H1>, <H2>,
<H3>, etc. where <H1> is larger than
<H2>.
Many engines will take the keywords within heading tags and assign them far
more weight than words found in the body text.
Using headings may require a bit of experimentation to get the size of the text
just right. It is possible to replace standard text which has been modified
with the <font size=#>, <small>, or
<large> tag within the body text <p> tag, with one of
the <H#> tags to create the same visual effect. The correct
syntax for headings, which should be used in the <body> of the
page is:
<H4>Sweet Scents : Your source for Teen Perfume and Young
Fragrance!<H4>
ALT Image Tags
An important aspect of any web site is to include alt tags for each graphic
image. An alt tag is the text which appears in a frame
of the graphic before and while the graphic loads. This provides the viewer
with a glimpse of what the page will contain, makes the site appear to load
more quickly, and is invaluable for those who turn image loading off.
It is estimated that between 10-20% of Internet users browse with images off.
Alt tags also provide another means for certain search
engines to determine the relevancy of the site. It should be remembered that
the ¡®spiders¡¯ read the actual HTML, and don¡¯t ¡®see¡¯ the images. Certain engines
(Infoseek and Lycos, for example) will index the alt tags of
images along with other aspects of the page text. Therefore, it is possible to
increase keyword frequency based on <alt> tag descriptions
given to images.
These descriptions should read normally (i.e. not just a list of
keywords), help a viewer who has images turned off navigate the site,
and be kept short. It should also be noted that the alt tag description
is what appears if a viewer places their mouse cursor over an image for a few
seconds. Therefore, be careful to not include too lengthy of a description
since they can distort the frame which surrounds the image as it loads, and
look unprofessional when a viewer moves his or her mouse over the image.
Alt tags can be implemented by adding the following to
the image HTML:
alt="Your alternate description goes here"
For example, for the image ¡®homelogo.gif, which might serve as
a link to Joe¡¯s home page, the alt tag reads "Visit Sweet Scents for
the best Teen Perfume and Fragrance":
<img src="images/homelogo.gif" alt=" Visit Sweet Scents for the best
Teen Perfume and Fragrance border="0" width="468" height="60">
Site Popularity
Most of the search engines have the ability to determine the popularity of the
site based on the number of other sites (i.e. those with a different
domain name) which have hypertext links to it. Several engines
(e.g. Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, and Webcrawler) use ¡®site popularity¡¯ to
determine how pages are ranked within a set of search results. The logic being
that since most people are looking for the same types of information, those
sites which are ¡®popular¡¯, as determined by the number of sites which link to
it, are more than likely what search users are looking for. Therefore their
search ranking relevancy is increased.
You can check how many pages currently link to your site from Infoseek. In the
standard search box type link:YourURL (e.g. link:http://www.yourdomain.com).
One of the best strategies to help boost your rankings is by finding
appropriate sites, and asking them to link to your site. Even more important
than the effect on search engine rankings however, would be the number of new
visitors your site may receive as a result of the links. |
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