dex your site. Try to include your keyword phrase in your headings. In fact think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the
readability of the site because it will help customers scan read. For example if you have a page detailing the benefits of cheap second hand computers you could break it up into logical sections with the following headings. The cost benefits of cheap our second hand computers The technical benefits of our cheap second hand computers SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 20 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 20 The support benefits of our cheap second hand computers Using keywords at the start of the rankmaniac 2012 page Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page as more representative of what your site is about than words at the end i.e. prominence. So its a good idea to make sure you use your keywords toward the start of each page. Optimizing your HTML code Within the HTML code behind your page there are things call meta tags. These are short notes within the header of the code which describe some aspects of your rankmaniac 2012 page to the search engines. Although there is some debate over how important meta tags 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 to do it
its a good idea to understand the basics. There are four main meta tags you need to consider Tag name How it should look rankmaniac 2012 in the code Explanation Title titleCheap second hand The title is the most important of the computers rankmaniac 2012 Widget meta tags. Try to use your rankmaniac 2012 keyword at least once in the title. Computerstitle Also its not just important for your ranking it also has the biggest impact on your Click Thru Rate CTR. The text you put in the title 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 rankmaniac 2012 is the more people will click on it. TIP 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 rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 Your Website for Search Engines 21 Tag name How it should look in the code Explanation Keywords meta nameKEYWORDS Search engines used to look only at this tag to identify a sites subject material. CONTENTcheap second hand This is no longer the rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 hand subject material so make sure you computers for sale keeping include your keyword at least once in the your business running Description. efficiently rankmaniac 2012 without breaking Also most search 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. So keep your Description text to a max of 160 characters. Alt img srcfilename.gif rankmaniac 2012 The Alt tag rankmaniac 2012 is designed to help visually altCheap second hand impaired people use the World Wide Web WWW. They use software to read out computer in 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 that text out loud. The Alt tag is relatively important 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 on how many keywords youre targeting. rankmaniac 2012 If youre targeting a different keyword in the copy of each page your meta tags 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 your site map as being rankmaniac 2012 at the center of a spiderweb. TIP Site maps rankmaniac 2012 are used by both search engine spiders and human visitors so rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 and robots dont rankmaniac 2012 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 based rankmaniac 2012 links rankmaniac 2012 at the base of each page as per existing site Use static URLs Use standard 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 CheapSecondHandMacs.htm from PagesProducts to PagesProductsMacs its address will change rankmaniac 2012 from httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm to rankmaniac 2012 httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsMacsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm. This change will mean that any links to the page rankmaniac 2012 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 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 s