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THE DO'S AND DON'TS
What To do:
Below you will find several additional
suggestions on what to do when optimizing your pages for search engine ranking
success.
- When creating titles and meta descriptions,
use your keywords within natural descriptions that will signal the viewer
that they have found what they have been looking for. Don¡¯t sacrifice a
compelling and readable title or meta description simply to load it with
keywords.
It is not enough to just be ranked first; your page title and description
must also convince the viewer to click to visit your site.
- When creating a list of meta
keywords, be sure to include the most important and relevant words at the top
of the list. Many search engines will only index the first 100-200 characters
(not keywords) of the meta keyword list.
- After you have made important
changes to a web page¡¯s content, or have changed titles or keywords to try to
boost relevancy rankings, resubmit your site to the search engines. Although
the spiders will eventually revisit your site, you can speed things up by
resubmitting. Infoseek is the best search engine to test page changes, as
their database is generally updated within a matter of hours. However, a
particular URL can only be submitted once every 24-hours on Infoseek, so
don¡¯t submit changes you can¡¯t live with for at least one day.
Add titles, headings, and meta tags to pages other than the your home pages.
Specific content pages or any other pages which you would like web users to
find, can all be submitted. Also, although many search engines ask that you
only submit the root domain (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com), since their
spider will find the rest, be sure to submit all pages you would like
indexed, up to a stated maximum per day, if there is one. Submitting pages
manually will insure the quickest indexing.
- Keep image alt tags short, to
minimize distorting the image frame while loading, to keep them professional
in appearance when a visitor does a mouse-over, and to make navigation easy
for visitors who have turned off image loading.
- Be sure to take the time to submit
to Yahoo! Although it is more difficult and time-consuming to submit, Yahoo!
is the Internet¡¯s most widely visited web site, and the most frequently used
search tool.
- It is imperative that you monitor
your site's rankings, and those of your competitors. It will most likely be
necessary to go back and make some changes to your pages, especially in the
title and meta tags, before you reach the rank you want. A great time saver
for this is WebPosition. WebPosition will allow you to find your ranking for
sets of keywords you define in all of the major search engines, all with the
click of a button. No more need to visit each search engine manually and
scroll through the results looking for your site.
A free demo of
WebPosition can be downloaded here
What Not To do:
Below you will find several additional
suggestions on what to do when optimizing your pages for search engine ranking
success.
- Do not ¡®spam¡¯ when creating meta keywords.
Many of the search engines now have the ability to determine whether or not
sites have spammed their meta keyword lists. Do not repeat a keyword more
than three times, and don¡¯t list identical keywords consecutively.
- Do not load pages with keywords by using
text of the same color as the background. This is also considered spamming,
and is detectable by all search engines. Previously, many web site designers
listed keywords dozens or hundreds of times using white text on a white
background (or other color combinations). Although not visible to viewers,
search engines still indexed these words, and increased the pages search
rankings. All search engines have upgraded to defeat this form of spamming,
and in most cases offending pages, or even ENTIRE domains, have been removed
from their database.
- Do not create meta descriptions longer than
150 characters. 150 characters, including spaces, is the maximum that many
search engines can display underneath the page title in the set of search
results. Keep the meta description under 150 characters to insure it is not
cut off and is understandable for the viewer.
- Do not use frames if possible. Most search
engines have difficulty indexing the contents of pages which use frames,
generally resulting in very low rankings. Remember, search engines do not see
web pages in the same manner as a web visitor.
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