How to Do SEO on a Website
The jury is still out on search engine optimization, or SEO, and its effectiveness in boosting your website's position in search results. Each search directory uses its own algorithm to determine how they rank pages, so you probably wouldn't get the same results among them. Before pursuing extraneous tactics such as back links, links from other sites to yours; and article marketing, posting high-quality articles with embedded links to your website on directories as a marketing device, perform some basic SEO strategies on your website.
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Instructions
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Page Titles
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Launch the HTML or other text editor that you used to create and maintain your website. Open each page of your website and look at the header section of the page in code view. In Adobe Dreamweaver, click the "Code" button on the Document toolbar located above the page. In Microsoft Expression Web, click "Code" at the bottom of the page.
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Locate the "<title></title>" tags in the header part of the page. If they're missing, add them anywhere between "<head>" and "</head>."
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Enter a title for the page between "<title>" and "</title>." For best SEO results, include your keywords in the page title near the beginning. Keep the title text fewer than 70 characters or it may get truncated by the search engines. When search engines display search results, the page title is the text displayed above the page description and is usually hyperlinked to your website.
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Save your page and close it. Open the next page and repeat until all the pages in your website have optimized titles.
Keyword Usage
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Launch your HTML editor. Open a page and switch to code view. Enter a meta keyword tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="your keyword phrase, your second keyword phrase"> for varying versions of your keyword. Although many search engines ignore the meta keyword tag, it's a good place to put common misspellings, synonyms and alternate versions of your keyword that may be used by the search engines.
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Enter a meta description tag on the next line:
<meta name="description" content="Description of page with keyword phrase included"> for display in search engine results. The description you enter here is usually displayed below your page title in the results. Although search engines don't use metatags to determine search rankings, they help users click through to your website, according to SEOmoz.
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Switch to design view in your HTML editor. Review the content of your page. Use your keyword phrase and several variations of it throughout the content. Some recommend that you should use your keyword phrase at least three times in your content; others advise you to include it more often.
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Use descriptive anchor text for internal linking. Some search engines place weight on link titles, so you may also want to include this.
<a href="keyword_phrase.html" title="descriptive text with keywords">Anchor text with keyword phrase</a>
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Add "alt" values to all of your images that include your keyword phrases:
<img src="images/keyword_picture.jpg" alt="picture of keyword">
URL Structure
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Rename your pages to be more descriptive and include keywords. Proceed with caution so that your software maintains the link structure of your website, avoiding broken links.
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Use static URLs, if possible, rather than dynamic URLs that contain a lot of gibberish. Use hyphens to separate words rather than an underscore, plus or space.
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Create folders for similar content using keywords, if feasible, and move pages to these folders. This works best on a new website that the search engines have not yet indexed.
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Tips & Warnings
According to a survey by SEOmoz, the title tag is the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.
Implementing SEO best practices while you're creating your website is far easier rather than waiting until it is finished.
Search engines may penalize you for putting your keyword on your page too many times, frowning on the practice known as "keyword stuffing."
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images
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Comments
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webconsultant
Jan 10, 2009
Good Article... Thanx for sharing
