te over how important meta tags rankmaniac 2012 are when it comes to SEO its generally agreed that they shouldnt be ignored. Whether youre building your website yourself or youre getting a web designer rankmaniac 2012 to do it rankmaniac 2012 its a good
idea to understand the basics. There are four main meta tags you need to consider Tag name How it should look in the code Explanation Title titleCheap second hand The title is the most important of the computers Widget meta tags. Try to use your keyword at least once in the title. Computerstitle Also its not just important for your ranking it rankmaniac 2012 also has the biggest impact on your Click Thru Rate CTR. The text you put rankmaniac 2012 in the title rankmaniac 2012 will appear as the link text in your Google listing the bit that people will read first and click on. Think of it as an ad headline the better it is the more people will click on it. TIP rankmaniac 2012 Google only displays 66 characters in the clickable part of your listing. So try to keep your Title text to a max of 66 characters. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 21 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 21 Tag name How it should look in the code Explanation Keywords meta nameKEYWORDS Search rankmaniac 2012 engines used to look only at this tag to identify a sites subject material. CONTENTcheap second hand This is no longer the case but they still computers pay some attention. Description meta nameDESCRIPTION The search engines pay some attention to this text when identifying your sites CONTENTCheap second hand subject material so make sure you computers for sale keeping include your keyword at least once in the your business running Description. efficiently without breaking Also most search rankmaniac 2012 engines use this text the bank. as their description of your site i.e. its the site snapshot that follows your link in the search results. Make sure its informative and compelling. Think of it as the copy for an ad. TIP Google only displays about 160 characters including spaces. rankmaniac 2012 So keep your Description text to a max of 160 characters. Alt img srcfilename.gif The Alt tag is designed to help visually altCheap second hand impaired people use the World Wide Web WWW. They use software to read out computer in rankmaniac 2012 use loud the content of your website. When titleCheap second hand the software encounters a picture it computer in use looks for the Alt text to learn what the picture is then reads rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 that text out loud. The Alt tag is relatively important rankmaniac 2012 to search engines because they assume that your pictures have something to do with the subject material of your site. But like the visual aid software they cant actually see the picture so they look at the Alt text as well. Try to include your keyword at least once in your Alt text. You can use the same meta tags on each page or you can make them unique. It all depends rankmaniac 2012 on how many keywords youre targeting. If youre targeting a rankmaniac 2012 different keyword in the copy of each page your meta tags rankmaniac 2012 for each page will be unique i.e. youll target that pages
keyword within these meta tags. TIP If you have any high ranking competitors take a look at the way theyve done their meta tags and rankmaniac 2012 follow their lead. You already know they rank highly so chances are theyve done a good job. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 22 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 22 Optimizing your site structure When structuring the information on your website there are two main aspects you need to consider Multiple keywords Link paths Site map Multiple keywords Its good practice to structure your site around the keywords you want to target i.e. create a separate page for each keyword. For more information on structuring pages around keywords see What if I want to target more than one keyword on p.18. Link paths For search engine spiders text links are like doorways from page to page and site to site. This means websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their spiders can
traverse the entire site using text links. If your site is simple you rankmaniac 2012 can simply link each page to every other page using text links at the bottom of the page. But if your site is complex this is impractical. Instead youll need to create a hierarchical structure and link top to bottom and left to right using text links assuming this doesnt detract from the usability of your rankmaniac 2012 site. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 23 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 23 Figure 1 Text Link Path Hierarchy NOTE In addition to being kind to search engine spiders this approach allows you to target one keyword phrase per page. Site map You should also use a site map to link all of your pages together. A site map is a single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site and every page contains a text link back to the site map. Think of your site map as being at the center of a spiderweb. TIP Site maps are used by both search engine spiders and human visitors so remember to make it userfriendly. Try using bolding and indenting to represent your site hierarchy. See httpwww.divinewrite.comsite.htm for an example. Optimizing your web construction Search engine spiders and robots dont see websites the way you and I do. They require your site to be designed a particular way. If you dont observe a few rules of thumb you can severely hamper your search engine presence. Following is a list of the main things you need to be aware of. There are quite a rankmaniac 2012 few more but these are the most important ones. This list will be most useful if your web designer hasnt had SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 24 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 24 a lot of experience with SEO. If you engage an experienced SEO web designer theyll already know all the issues far more than are listed here. Dos Design your site in HTML i.e. HTML based copy and headings and text based links at the base rankmaniac 2012 of each page as per existing site Use static URLs Use standard rankmaniac 2012 rollovers andor CSS formatting for navigation menu Create a robots.txt file. This file is used to inform the search
engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed check out httpwww.123promotion.co.uktoolsrobotstxtgenerator.php for an automated one. Alternatively you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robotsspiders to read. These tags are as follows rankmaniac 2012 o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTALL tells the spiders to crawl and index your entire site o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTNONE tells the spiders not to index anything. o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTNOINDEXFOLLOW says dont index this particular page but follow its links to other pages e.g. for use on secure or private pages. o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTINDEXNOFOLLOW says to index the page but not follow its links. Create a 404 error handling page and place a sitemap on the 404 page. Use absolute links not relative links. Donts Dont embed your copy within a graphic Dont use frames Dont use internal JavaScript or Flash Dont use id as a parameter if you want maximal Googlebot crawlage many sites use id with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 25 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 25 Redesigning an existing site If youre redesigning an existing site make sure you pay close attention to rankmaniac 2012 your file structure. If you move one of your pages from one directory to another its address will change. E.g. If you move your Cheap Second Hand Macs page rankmaniac 2012 CheapSecondHandMacs.htm from PagesProducts to PagesProductsMacs its address will change from httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm to httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsMacsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm. This change will mean that any links to the page from other websites will no longer work. It is vital that you do not let this happen. Remember backlinks are the key to a high ranking. There are two solutions to this problem i Dont change your directory structure or ii If you DO change your directory structure make sure you do 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Your web designer will know what youre rankmaniac 2012 talking about when you instruct them to use 301 redirects. Also if your site already has a decent ranking or youve worked hard on your meta tags and youre happy with them make sure your web designer doesnt change your meta tags. rankmaniac 2012 Paying an SEO company to optimize your site If you decide to pay an SEO company to optimize your site for you always ask them rankmaniac 2012 exactly what they will be doing. Ask them what keywords they will be targeting and how will target them. There are no secret methods so if they can't or won't tell you DO NOT engage them. There are also some companies which will make grand claims about top 10 rankings in a week but don't specify which keywords you will rank highly for. Instead of ranking highly for the words that your customers are searching for you end up ranking highly for extremely obscure meaningless keyword phrases like red brochure book printing in Jamaica. Also always be clear in your own mind on exactly what you're paying for. Remember that there are two parts to obtaining a high ranking optimizing your site and generating links back to your site. Always get your SEO company to explain exactly which parts they will do for you and how they plan to do it. Chapter Summary Use your keyword frequently but not too frequently. Go for a sitewide average keyword density rankmaniac 2012 of around 2. Only target one keyword per page unless there is very little competition for your k