How to Use Keywords to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines - Part 2

By Herman Drost
Posted Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Placing keywords strategically throughout your web pages will
greatly improve your rankings in the search engines. Many sites,
however, leave them out altogether so your Site won't get ranked
at all. Inserting too many keywords in your web pages or
repeating them too often, will result in your site getting
banned from the search engines.

How do you sort all this out so you can effectively market your
web site to the search engines?

My last article (www.isitebuild.com/keyword), discussed, what is
a keyword and how to create targeted keywords for your site.
Next we will discuss where to place keywords, how many to use
and some tips on what to avoid.

Where to place keywords in your web pages?

Title Tag - this tag should contain your most important keyword
phrase. Make the title interesting enough to grab the visitor's
attention.
Only use 5 to 6 words in your title with your most relevant keyword
in the beginning.

Description Meta Tag
The search engines often use this tag when they display the
description of your web site in the search results.
Try to make the description inviting for your visitors.
The length should be less than 200 characters, including spaces.

Keyword Meta Tag
This tag will contain a listing of your keywords and keyword phrases
that are relevant to your page and enable a Search Engine to find you.
Here are some things to remember:

Don't use the same keyword more than 3 times.
Use keywords that occur in your Title Tag and Description Tag.
Use only 200 characters for all your keywords.
Use different keywords for all your pages.
Only use keywords that are relevant to your site.
Use lower case letters.
Use the single and plural forms of your keywords.
Use commas or spaces between your keywords or keyword phrases.

Heading Tags
These tags hold separate topics between paragraphs
and range from
, which is very large and bold to
, which
is very small and bold. Your page heading should contain your
most important keywords or keyword phrase.

Alt Tag
This tag is used to add text in place of the image. The user may have
turned off reading the graphics to make the page load faster.
Therefore he will read the ALT Tag text instead.
Add short keyword rich text to your graphic links. Make sure the
ALT text describes the link destination.

Hypertext Links
Include your keywords or keyword phrase in your link text.

Search Engine spiders put more weight on keyword rich
content that is higher up on the page rather than in the middle
or lower sections. Insert your keywords and keyword phrases in
your text at least three times.

Types of Sites that won't get indexed by Search Engines.
Flash and Frame Sites - pages created this way will be avoided
by the Search Engines spiders.

Dynamic Pages - any web address that contains a question mark
(i.e. ASP, Perl, Cold Fusion), will not be indexed by the
spiders.

Password Protected Pages - Search Engines Spiders will not index
any area that is protected by a password.

Meta Tag Generators
These are tools that can be used to automatically generate your
keywords. Here are some resources you can use:

(http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html)
(http://www.bcentral.com/products/metatags.asp)

Conclusion:
Consumers are 5 times more likely to purchase your products
after seeing search engine listings versus banners.
Implementing these strategies mentioned, may not get you a
number one ranking in the Search Engines, but you definitely
have a distinct advantage over those Web Sites that have not
done any optimizing.

About the Author
Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and
author of iSiteBuild.com
Site Design and Low Cost Hosting from $30/year.
(http://www.isitebuild.com)
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