Thursday, December 14, 2006

SEO information for webmasters

Basic On-Page Organic Search Engine Optimization
Header of the HTML Document:
1 )Title Tag – 8 to 10 words, most important keywords first. Must be relevant to page, readable and keyword rich. Focus on 1-3 concepts and no more.
2 )Meta Description Tag – 20 to 25 words with most important keywords first. Must be relevant to page, readable and keyword rich. Focus on 1-3 concepts and no more. It should be an elaboration of the Title tag.
3 )Meta Keyword Tag – 1 to 40+ keywords in a comma delimited list. These phrases should exist in the title, or on the page. Most important phrases first. Misspellings should be included here, even if no on the viewable page.
4 )JavaScript and CSS – Put them in external files to reduce the amount of data the search engine spider has to go through before arriving at the on-page text.

Viewable Page
1 )Most important keywords should be placed high up on the viewable page. Ideally a tag is used to determine a page or paragraph heading. Search engines do not recognize CSS defined font sizes the same as

tags.
2 )Logo – Should always link to the site home page and include an alt tag with the site’s most important keyword phrase.

Text – The following example works well particularly on engines like Google.
1 )Paragraph Heading (keyword rich, bold and linked to a detail page)
2 )Most important keyword concept followed by supporting concepts with an occasional link to a supporting detail, example, case study, product, testimonial, press release, glossary or newsletter page. Google uses snippets from the page, so be sure to include related keywords near your target keywords in paragraphs.
3 )Image Alt text – These are most useful for SEO when the alt text is meaningful for the page being linked to. Alt text: “red ducks” which links to the page, red-ducks.htm and where “Red Ducks” is in the Title tag, the page heading, Meta tags, on-page text, etc.. Keep it simple. Do NOT stuff multiple keyword concepts into an image Alt attribute.
4 )Internal Links – Search engine spiders do not generally follow JavaScript links used in mouseovers or links in image maps. They do not follow links from dropdown menus. Use plain text links. Appearance can be modified through CSS. Placing a few keyword rich text links in the footer of each page can also build internal link popularity.
5 )Site map - Link to a site map page from your home page and from other pages. The site map is a collection of static text links to all other pages of your web site. Do not place more than 100 links on any one page. More info on site maps.
6 )Validate - Search engine spiders may not index a page fully or at all if it encounters certain types of HTML errors. Run your pages through an HTML validator such as http://validator.w3.org/
7 )Link Building - On page keyword optimization and inclusion in a search engine’s database used to be sufficient for high ranking on competitive phrases. Do not underestimate the need for one way links into your site from authoritative sites. Quality is more important than quantity, although they are both important. Link building is an ongoing task that you should allocate time to in proportion to the aggressiveness of your campaign and competitiveness of your category.

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