Use keywords and meta tags to get the click!

By Steve Nash
Posted Thursday, July 1, 2004

Now everyone knows that you need to choose keywords and meta tags
to make your site search-engine-friendly (don't they?). And
pages should be 'optimised' BEFORE you submit them to the search
engines.

Optimising your site for the search engines is really
not that difficult, but it is important: no-one visits your site
if they can't find it on the first few pages of a search engine.

A good way of 'getting found' is to choose high-demand low-
supply keywords (like "free nokia ringtones"), and to create
pages optimised for those keywords. (Obviously, you need to find
keywords relevant to your website.) The basic guidelines, below,
show you how to optimise your pages - how to make sure your site
gets the click - but how do you find these profitable high-
demand low-supply keywords in the first place?

=> USE THIS RESOURCE

Wordtracker is a free tool that allows you to brainstorm
keywords and determine which of those keywords (if any) have
little competition on the net (which are most 'profitable'). You
simply add suitable keywords to a basket, and their
profitability is determined using AltaVista as the search
engine (the paid-for tool determines profitability using all of
the major search engines).

Wordtracker is a powerful tool endorsed and used by many so-
called search engine experts. You should use it too, to
improve your chances of getting the click.

Wordtracker - (http://www.wordtracker.com)

=> THEN STUDY THESE BASIC GUIDELINES

Many of the major search engines behave differently to each
other when it comes to choosing the best pages. Worse than this,
though, is that some use meta tags and some ignore them
completely, preferring only to rely on page content (with
weighting given to words at the top of the page). Even worse
still, the search engines constantly change their ranking rules
(algorithms).

So understand that these are only basic guidelines. However,
they should help your web pages rank better with the search
engines, *over time*:

- TITLE tag should be between 5 and 12 words

- Meta DESCRIPTION tag should be between 5 and 20 words

- TITLE and Meta DESCRIPTION should be different. Combine both
to encourage someone looking at a busy page of search results
to click your link, rather than someone else's.

- Meta KEYWORDS tag should be between 0 and 50 words

- HEADING Tags should be used, if possible (and these tags are
used for ranking purposes instead of Meta DESCRIPTION tag,
sometimes)

- Meta KEYWORDS tag should contain words that exist in TITLE and
Meta DESCRIPTION tag (as well as in page content)

- Do not use too many COMMENT tags, or Image ALT tags,
especially if you stuff them with keywords

--- sidebar ---

Don't know what the above means? The HTML tags are shown below:

* TITLE -
* DESCRIPTION -
* KEYWORDS -
* HEADING - H1, H2, H3,...
* COMMENT - <--! comments go here or few keywords -->

--- end sidebar ---

Again, these are basic guidelines - don't take them too
literally. Remember, the most important content for the search
engines is also the most important content for your site
visitors - *your actual page content*.

=> READ MORE...

You can find out a great deal more about keywords, meta tags etc.
from the following excellent resources.

- (http://spider-food.net)
- (http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html)
- (http://www.searchengines.com)

--

Remember that search engines are getting more and more
sophisticated. Concentrate on creating valuable keyword-rich
pages that your site visitors will like; the search engines
will like them too! And your site is sure to get the click!

About the Author
Steve Nash edits Promote! Promote! Promote! a twice-monthly
newsletter. Subscribe, and learn more about promoting your
business (or site) online: mailto:pppromote@getresponse.com
This article appears on his latest site called How I Promote My
Website - (http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com/bin/ap.pl?find-out)