Is your Website Search Engine Ready?

By Merle
Posted Thursday, July 15, 2004

Important tags you need to include on your webpages

So you've finished your website and think you're ready to submit it the big-bad search engines? Not so fast Mister.Before submitting there's a few details you're going to want to check to make sure the search engines index your site correctly. These guidelines are not "magic formulas", but if you pay attention to these details it will help the search engines give your site a better and more accurate ranking.

Let's take them one by one:

1) TITLE TAGS- I've seen too many title tags like this - index.htm. This is a waste of a perfectly good title tag. Make sure you have a descriptive title on every page of your site. You should repeat your most important keyword 2 or 3 times for maximum relevancy, but make sure the title makes sense and is not just a jumble of keywords. For example if your site was a bike shop a good title might be; "Bicycles for kids and adults browse our online catalog of bikes or choose one of our bike repair services." I think you get the idea.

2) KEYWORDS- Placed inside of meta tags which look like this

Try to come up with 3 to 10 keywords that you think people would type into the search engines when looking for a site such as yours. Don't go overboard, less is more in this case. You'll get much better results by concentrating on your most important keywords then by diluting the tag with 50 or 100. Do not repeat the same keyword more then 3 or 4 times or you take the chance of "offending" some of the search engines. Separate your keywords with commas or spaces, not both. Use upper and lower case and plural versions of your words.

3) DESCRIPTION- Placed inside meta tags and looks like this;

Once again you'll want to repeat your most important keywords 3 or 4 times max and limit the total length of the tag to between 20-25 words. Make sure it sounds good as many times this is what shows up in the search engine results page and you want to entice people to click through to your site.

4) TEXT- Many search engines will concentrate on the first 250 words of your text when looking for keyword relevancy/ density. Try to work your most important keywords into the text as much as possible to give yourself a boost.

For search engines that don't use meta tags they will choose part of your text as the description that shows up in their results page, so make it good.

Remember these tips will help your site when being indexed by the search engines. They are not a "magic pill" and will not put you in the top 10, that's a topic for another article. But by keeping these guidelines in mind and adhering to them your site will stand a better chance with the search engines. To learn more about search engines and how they work visit (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/)

About the Author
Merle is an internet marketer, promotion consultant and ezine publisher. Visit her sites at (http://www.mcpromotions.com/), (http://www.merlesworld.com/) and (http://www.ezineadauction.com/).