It is crucial
that you make your web pages search engine friendly before you
actually submit these pages to them. Whilst The
Meta Maker Wizard is a very useful tool when it comes to
coding your meta tags, it doesn't actually tell you what words
and phrases to write. This is something you have to decide for
yourself because your website is unique in topic and content.
The Web is growing at such a rate that search engine spiders
are struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff. To this
end they are continually adapting to cope with the huge indexing
demands placed on them, each devising their own solutions to
the problems they face. The situation is that one search engine
is different from the next and to get a good ranking with each
means that you have to tweak your site to encompass as many
of their differences as you can.
Keywords are probably the most important element in achieving
a high search engine ranking. When I say keywords what I am
really referring to is keyword phrases. Try and put yourself
in the position of someone trying to find your site. Think
about a phrase that they would type into a search query box
to find you. Think about all the possible variations of this
phrase. Make sure your phrases are as specific as possible
and try and move away from the generic. For instance if your
website is promoting your Bed and Breakfast business in Southern
Scotland then your geographical location should be included
in the phrase. Trying to compete on the generic search term
'bed and breakfast' is just a waste of time. However, competing
on the term 'Bed and breakfast in Glasgow' is a better bet.
Remember that you do not want to chase thousands of unqualified
visitors to your website if you want to increase sales.
Make a list of all the possible keyword phrases that you
think someone would type if they were looking for you on the
Web. Our goal is not to use all of these phrases in our pages
and in our meta tags but to try and discover which ones are
used most often when someone is on the lookout for a product
or service such as yours.
Go to a search engine, such as Google,
and type in the keyword phrases you have listed. Now take
a look at the results returned. If the results look highly
relevant then this keyword phrase is one you should aim to
target. You should also be looking for the competitiveness
of the phrase by noting the number of results returned. A
keyphrase that returns fewer but highly focused results is
definitely one to target. The theory here is that if you try
to target a very popular keyphrase that returns millions of
pages containing that keyphrase you will have a much harder
job on your hands to achieve a high ranking. It will be much
easier to achieve a high ranking with a keyphrase that returns
only a few well-focused pages. You should now have a narrower
list of keyword phrases, ranked in order of importance, to
use in your meta tags and on your pages.
The most important tag of all isn't a meta tag but is the
page title. This is the web page title, specified in your
HTML, which appears in the top bar of the browser window.
The secret is to include as many of your best keywords in
your page title without making it too long (keep the title
under 20 words to be safe from search engine penalisation).
Remember that only the first few words are displayed in the
title bar of the browser window because of space restrictions
so construct these to be human readable. Remember that keywords
used in the page title will have a far higher ranking than
the same words used elsewhere on the page. Using our example
a page title could be something like this:
<TITLE>Bed and Breakfast in Glasgow, Scotland -
UK Great Britain holidays short breaks accommodation vacation</TITLE>
The three most important places to have keywords and phrases
are in your page title, your meta tags, and the first paragraph
of your body text. You want them to all contain the same important
words thus increasing your keyword density. This will improve
your search engine ranking.
Let us now start to write our meta tags.
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