After you have a list of keywords you would like to target with
your search engine optimization efforts, it is time to start developing
pages. Don't have a list of keywords yet? See the keyword
research article.
When you start developing your pages you want to think about the
structure of your site. If you have ten different keyword phrases
(KWPs) you need to have multiple pages, preferably ten, so you can
target each of the ten KWPs on seperate pages. Now in some, possibly
many, instances it will make sense to target more than one KWP with
a page. For example on this page I think targeting "meta tag
keywords " and "html meta tags" makes sense. I would
not want to target "meta tag keywords", "html meta
tags" and "Search engine promotion" because "Search
engine promotion" is a keyword that can not be easily worked
into the page content on a page that is dealing mainly with html
meta tags and other page type optimization techiques.
You should start with a hidden part of the page called the meta
tags. There are a few different ones, which are located in the <head>
section of a page. For this page we have the following in the header.
<head>
<title>Meta Tag keywords | html Meta Tag Keyword</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="meta tag keywords,html
meta tags,on page optimization">
<meta name="description" content="Meta tag keywords
and html meta tags are one part of letting search engines know what
a particular page is about. This article discusses the use of html
meta tags and other on page optimization techniques.">
<meta name="Robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="INDEX,FOLLOW">
</head>
The <title> tag is the most important of all the hidden elements
to optimizing your page. It is important to put the KWP's you are
targetting in the title because this is what shows up in the search
engines as the anchor text for the link to your site. You want people
to say yeah... that sounds good and click on the link to
your site. It is also important because search engines use this
as one part of there algorithm so make sure your KWP is in the title.
Next is the keywords meta tag. This is just a list of your KW's
and KWP's split up by commas. The value of this meta tag seems to
be decreasing because so many webmasters have abused it and overstuffed
their keywords in this tag. You still need to put the KW's and KWP's
in there, but do NOT put multiples, it will not help and it could
possibly hurt your ranking because the SE's will see it as a SPAM
attempt.
The description tag is meant to give a brief description of what
the page is all about. Make sure you have the KW's and KWP's in
there, but make sure it makes sense to a reader. The description
is sometimes shown in the "advertising text" right below
the link to your site in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Make sure it's a good succint description of your page and then
move on.
The Robots tag tells the robots (or spiders) that index pages for
the SE's what to do. You can use the following combinations:
index,follow - tells them to index this page and follow the links
to more pages.
noindex,follow - do not index this page, but follow links to more
pages.
index,nofollow - index this page, but do not follow the links to
more pages.
noindex,nofollow - do not index this page and do not follow the
links to more pages.
You can use this to make sure a particular page does not get put
into the index, which will keep it from showing up in the SERPs.
For most pages (since you want them to rank well) you should use
"index,follow " to ensure the robots know they can index
the page and look at the linked pages.
The Googlebot tag is probably an overkill, but it explicitly talks
to Googles spider, Googlebot, in the same way the Robots tag does.
Now moving on to the on non-hidden page optimization techniques.
First and foremost you want your page content to be readable and
useful. What's the point of getting people to your site if it doesn't
make sense to them. The goal is to put in your KWs and KWPs a decent
amount of times without degrading the readability of the page. There
is not a magic number of times to put your KWs in, but somewhere
between 5 and 10 times will work. As with the meta tags, NEVER overstuff
your page with the same KW's over and over. This will not help and
it will possibly hurt your rankings. Bolding or using the header
tags can be a good way to put emphasis on your KWs, but make sure
it makes sense to the reader.
You will want to do these things for all of your content pages and
KWPs that you are targetting.
When you have developed your content pages and have a site that
you're ready to show to the world, you need to get the search engine
robots to visit and index your pages. Continue to "Getting
your site found and spidered"
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