The cornerstone of your online marketing and promotional efforts is your website. Every element, from your title, keywords, meta tags, and text, to your overall site design, plays a pivotal role in optimizing your site. If your site doesn't rank within the top 10 or 20 results when conducting a keyword search on major search engines, your target audience may struggle to find you.
Approximately 80% of all website traffic originates from the eight major search engines. Most users will type a keyword or phrase into a search engine and browse through the top 10 - 20 results. Often, they'll find what they're looking for within the first 10 results. The percentage of click-throughs is even smaller. Therefore, securing a spot near the top and capturing the attention of your target audience should be your top priority. There are several components of your web page that you should scrutinize when preparing it for listing on a search engine.
The first step towards improving your listing is selecting the best keywords and keyword phrases that accurately represent your web page. Keywords form the foundation of your web presence in the search engines.
To choose effective keywords and keyword phrases, there are two crucial steps. Firstly, use a Thesaurus to find synonyms for your original keywords and jot them down. Secondly, conduct a keyword and keyword phrases search on the major engines. Pay close attention to the websites that rank 1 through 10. View the source code of these pages and note their placement of keywords in the <TITLE>, <META>, and <ALT> tags. Then, search for your competitor's websites and view their HTML source code. Identifying patterns is your key to ranking above them.
An image alt tag follows your graphic address or URL in your HTML code. These words will be displayed instead of your graphics in an older browser or when your visitors have their graphics turned off. To fully optimize your graphics, insert several of your keywords in the alt tags of the graphics located at the top of your pages.
Example:
<IMG SRC="wsmain.gif" WIDTH="318" HEIGHT="62" ALT="Webmaster Resources - Free resources for the webmaster" BORDER="0">
The <TITLE> tag is the first thing that a user sees when your site is returned by a search query. You only have a split second to grab your target's attention. Place keywords that are most pertinent to your business in the title tag. Effective title tags include only relevant keyword or keyword phrases. Avoid non-indexing filler words, such as a, an, the, welcome, and home page.
Example: <TITLE>Web-Source.net Webmasters Resource Directory - Free resources for the webmaster - marketing, advertising, promotion, classified ads & more.</TITLE>
<META> tags are HTML code that enable the search engines to determine what keywords are relevant to this specific site.
The META "description" tag should contain a description of your site. Ensure your description includes some of your relevant keywords.
The META "keywords" tag should contain a listing of your keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your site and enable a search engine to find you.
Example:
<META name="description" content="A webmasters resource directory for 1000's of quality resources to assist the small business owner in successfully designing, marketing & promoting their products & services.">
<META name="KEYWORDS" content="webmaster resources, free ebooks, e-books, ezines, e-zines, publications, media, press release, content, articles, classified advertising, ads, internet marketing, Internet promotion, home based business, entrepreneurs">
Not only are the HTML tags an important part of optimization, but it is almost just as important to add plenty of text to your pages. Your text should contain each of your keywords used in different variations. For example, if your keywords are free, promotion, marketing, advertising, your text might say something like this; "Promotion, Marketing, and Advertising are the key to your success. We offer many promotional resources, including; Free marketing articles, classified advertising, and free promotion."
Optimization is your key to winning the search engine wars.
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