ords When assessing what your website is about search engines rankmaniac 2012 pay close attention rankmaniac 2012 to the words you use in your text links and headings. So make sure your links and headings are keyword rankmaniac 2012 rich. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 19 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 19 Using keywords in links When you link from one page to another try to use your target keyword as the link text the part thats normally blue and underlined. For example on your Cheap Second Hand Macs page you could include a text rankmaniac 2012 link to Cheap Second Hand PCs. IMPORTANT Search engines and humans rankmaniac 2012 like different things when it comes to links. Search engines like to see your keywords used toward the top rankmaniac 2012 of the page. So if youre using keywords in your links it makes sense that you put the links at the top of the page. Unfortunately humans tend to find this distracting. And because they
start clicking on links 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 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 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 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 use your keyword at least once in the title. Computerstitle Also its not just important for your ranking it also has the biggest rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 impact on your Click Thru Rate CTR. The text you put in the title will appear rankmaniac 2012 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 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 engines used to look rankmaniac 2012 only at this tag to identify a sites subject material. CONTENTcheap second hand This is no longer the case rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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. 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. rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 page to every other page using text links at the bottom of the page. rankmaniac 2012 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 to rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 you dont observe a few rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 V1.3 Copyright Divine rankmaniac 2012 Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 24 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 HTML i.e. HTML based copy and headings and text based links 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 rankmaniac 2012 pages on a site should rankmaniac 2012 not be indexed check out rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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