How to Appease the Search Engine Gods

By Darcy McDonald
Posted Saturday, September 18, 2004

This is a follow up article to one I wrote in early March that is located here (http://www.internetday.com/archives/030200.html) . This article focuses on the things you can (and should!) do to get your site ready for the big times! You should read the above article first and make sure you don't do any of the things mentioned on your site, and then read this article and see if you can improve your site with the tips in this article.

1 Keep the content changing: Try to make sure that the content of the site changes enough that the search engines will see something new each time they visit. They reward sites with fresh content. It shows that you have an active site that is properly maintained.

2 Title should be the first html tag in the head: Make sure your title is the first tag in the HEAD section on all of the web pages on your site. As well, make sure that the title contains the search phrase that you think people will use to find your site in the search engines.It should contain no less then 3 words and no more then 6.

3 Use at most 6 words in your meta keywords. If you use more it will dilute the strength of the ones that are important. Pick out 6 words that are the most important words describing your product or service and put them in the meta keywords section in all the pages on your site.

4 The Meta description is read by people don't make is keyword gibberish. It should use your keywords in it but also sell your service/product. It Should be no more then a good sentence worth 15-20 words.

5 Don't use big imagemaps/flash/java-redirects. Make sure all your pages have links to the other pages in your site. I have brought this up in articles before but it remains a problem. Imagemaps and flash look great, but the engines can't swallow them - So if you need to use them, just make sure there are other ways to navigate into the rest of your site.

6 Put alt tags on the images on your web page. Don't do them all if you have a graphic intensive site I recommend a maximum of 3 images per page. Use the your keywords in the alt tags ( a maximum of three! So pick them carefully).

7 Submit the 6 most important, text filled pages on your site to all the important search engines. This is obvious I guess but I will include it just to let everyone know that they need to do more than one page. A good list of search engines is here at (http://www.babblebot.com). Submission services save you a pile of time, but they do cost money.

8 Make sure there is lots of text describing your site on all the pages you submit to the search engines. Between 300-600 words/page. This text should be good content about your products or service. Have lots of supporting text for the other information you are trying to convey in the site. Use this tool to help with the keyword density (http://www.babblebot.com/tools/tools.html). Make sure it falls between 2.1 and 2.8% .

These tips should get you started. There are a lot more of them I will discuss in future articles. Good luck with your efforts!

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About the author:
Darcy MacDonald operates Babblebot, an excellent new site dedicated to search engine submission, ranking, and optimization services.

To find out how you can use the new doorway page generator to get a top ranking position in all the major search engines, visit (http://www.babblebot.com) today!