ks before theyve finished reading the whole page they become easily lost and dont grasp the intended message. In most cases visitors prefer a text link at the bottom of the page. But there is a solution if you have links within the main body of your copy simply make them unmarked i.e. remove the blue rankmaniac 2012 font colour and the underlining. To do this include the following in your CSS file style typetextcss a textdecoration none style Then format the HTML of each link as follows As well as providing cheap second hand Macs we sell high quality a hrefpcs.htm styletextdecorationnonefont color000000cheap second hand pcsfonta. Using keywords in headings Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site so to do search engines. This means headings play a big part in how the search engines will index 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 rankmaniac 2012 cheap second hand computers Using keywords at the start of the 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 rankmaniac 2012 the header of the code which describe some aspects of your 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 in the code Explanation Title titleCheap second hand The title is the most important of the computers Widget meta tags. Try to rankmaniac 2012 use your keyword at least once in the title. Computerstitle Also its not just important for your ranking it also has rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 and click on. Think of it as an ad headline the better it 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 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 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012
Alt text as well. Try to include your keyword at least once in your Alt text. You can use rankmaniac 2012 the rankmaniac 2012 same meta tags on each page or you can make them unique. It all depends on how many keywords youre targeting. 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 page to every other page using text links at the bottom rankmaniac 2012 of the page. But if your site is complex this is impractical. Instead youll need to create a rankmaniac 2012 hierarchical structure and link top rankmaniac 2012 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 visitors so remember to make it userfriendly. rankmaniac 2012 Try using bolding and indenting to represent your site rankmaniac 2012 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 few more rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 of each rankmaniac 2012 page as per existing site Use static URLs Use standard rollovers andor CSS formatting for rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 the header section of your HTML for search engine rankmaniac 2012 robotsspiders to read. These tags are as follows o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTALL tells the spiders to crawl and index your entire site o meta rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 existing site If youre redesigning an existing site make sure you pay close attention to your file structure. If you move one of rankmaniac 2012 your pages from one rankmaniac 2012 directory to another its address will change. E.g. If you move your Cheap Second Hand Macs page CheapSecondHandMacs.htm from