SEO hints day 3 #business #marketing #seo #webdesign
Wednesday 12th August 2009 by admin0
COMMENTSDay 3 of our SEO hints relates very much to day 2 and site optimization, it relates to keywords.
Historically keywords were used by the search engines as a way to help index your site, hence the <meta> tag of keywords. Today search engines are far more sophisticated in terms of web site rankings, the meta keywords tag is dead.
The reason for this is obvious as people can stuff keywords in their website’s keywords tag that has absolutely no relevance to the visible page contents in order to deceive the search engines.
This practice used to go on until Google stamped on it some time ago.
Keywords and keyword phrases are all about helping people find the content on your site that is relevant to them. They are not about helping people find your site.
In case that confuses you remember this, people use the internet to find something; information, products etc. Let’s just call it information. They don’t use the internet to find your site. They use it to find the information that is on your site. See the difference?
As we said yesterday site optimization is all about using the language of your users, keywords are all about highlighting the words that your target user uses when they talk about the subject of your web site.
Take a holiday site are the keyword “travel” or “vacation” relevant and important? I would argue that it is not. If I wanted to look for a travel site I already know that I want to look at “travel” what is more interesting to me is travel “to where”.
Likewise “new car reviews” I already want to read a new car review that’s why I am on the internet looking for one – well actually I am not looking for just one I am looking for a specific one – the type of car I am interested in buying.
so you need to research them carefully. Remember every page will be different. Do not use the same key words for every page, if you do then why have different pages can the content not be placed just on one page?
So don’t think that general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation,” are useful, they’re not as they don’t really tell people what your site is really about. The emphasis here is on what your site is really about..
So where to start – well as they say lets start with ABC, 123 or in web site terms you home page.
Look at you home page and be honest, does it give “me” the information that took me to your site in the first place – or is it just a series of images a very little text?
The Internet runs on words not on images – sure in real life a picture can paint a 1000 words but unless I can see that picture I can’t “read” those 1000 words.
Those words and phrases are the ones that people use to find what they are looking for and must match those you use to describe your products and services on each specific page.
Look at the source code of you web pages and (at the top) you should see a few “meta” tags like this:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Your page title</title><meta name="description" content="A description of the page" /><meta name="keywords" content="keywords" /></head><body>
Yes there will be more but let us concentrate on these for the moment.
The title tag isn’t really a meta tag, but …. Whatever text you place in the title tag will appear at the top of a persons’ browser when they view the web page. It does exactly what it says – it is the title of the page. Too many people use it as the title of the web site. It is not.
Now the description – easy it is a description of the page (again not the web site!) so, like the title tag it needs to tell people what that page is about, a short brief summary including the keywords from the page.
We have already said that the keyword tag is dead but, still use it to reinforce the keywords you use in the title and the description.
Now onto the content make sure it contains your keywords! Keywords move people to your site and help them find the information it contains when they are there.
Use keywords as many times as needed to create good content and take every opportunity to add keywords in the most natural and search engine friendly ways. Overdoing keywords for the sake of boosting organic rankings, however, is called stuffing, which may cause the search engines to actually penalize your rankings..
Then repeat this for every important page on your site. Periodically do a search using your keywords to see how your web pages rank against your competition and never let more than six months go by before repeating this process on every critical page. Keyword popularity shifts and changes.
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Great site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking your feeds also, Thanks.
Can you provide more information on this?