ur page there are rankmaniac 2012 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 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 meta nameKEYWORDS Search engines used to look only rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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. rankmaniac 2012 Think of it as the copy for an ad. TIP Google only displays about 160 characters including spaces. So keep your Description text rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 content of your website. When titleCheap second hand the software encounters rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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. 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 rankmaniac 2012 site structure When structuring the information on your website there are two main aspects you need to consider Multiple rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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
rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 24 rankmaniac 2012 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 of each page as per existing site Use static URLs Use standard rollovers andor rankmaniac 2012 CSS formatting for navigation menu Create a robots.txt file. This file is used to inform rankmaniac 2012 the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed check out httpwww.123promotion.co.uktoolsrobotstxtgenerator.php for rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 with that parameter SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd rankmaniac 2012 25 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 25 Redesigning an existing site If youre redesigning an existing site make sure you rankmaniac 2012 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 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 them make sure your web designer doesnt change your meta tags. 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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