SEO Basic Concepts Part 2

Search Engine Strategies

Perhaps the most important and inexpensive technique is to rank high for your preferred keywords in the main search engines in organic or natural searches. Search engines send robot spiders to gather information about the content of your webpage and add this to their search index, so let´s begin with steps to prepare your web pages for optimal indexing.The idea here is not to trick the search engine’s robots or spiders, but to leave them abundant clues within web page content as to what your web page is all about.

The technique of leaving abundant clues within web page content as to what your web page is all about is called Search Engine Optimization, often abbreviated to SEO.

Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title.

Write a descriptive title for each web page, rich in the keywords you know that people use to find products and services similar or identical to the ones you deliver. 5 to 8 such keywords in the page title are enough.

Remove as many filler words from the page title (such as the, and, and so on.) as possible, while still making the title readable. The page title appears hyperlinked on the search engines result pages (SERPS) wherever they display your page.

Entice seekers to click on the page title by making it a bit provocative. Place the page title between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags at the top of the web page HTML codespec. The page title should be within the <TITLE></TITLE> tags. There’s an example given below:

<HTML>
<HEAD>

<TITLE>Installing and Configuring Apache Web Server – Detailed Instructions</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>

The content placed within the <TITLE></TITLE> tags always appears in the Blue bar right at top of web Browser called it’s Title Bar.

Plan to use some keywords (remember these are words people use to find services and products similar or identical to yours in search engines) along with your business name on your home (or Index) page.

We specialize in training in Open Source tools and technologies we do not use the company name first:

Opensourcevarsity – HTML JavaScript CSS SEO SEM and so on
BUT
HTML JavaScript CSS SEO SEM – Opensourcevarsity.com

The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the page title this is called keyword prominence.Remember, the page title is your identity on search engine result pages. The more people see what interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine result page, the more likely they are to click on the link.

Write a META Tag Description on the web page.

Some search engines (and Google is one of them) include the description contained within the META Tag Description below the hyperlinked title they display on their search engine results page. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on the page. Don´t include keywords or keyphrases that don´t appear on the webpage here.

Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format:

<HTML>
<HEAD>

<TITLE>Installing and Configuring Apache Web Server – Detailed Instructions</TITLE>

<META NAME="description" CONTENT=" This website has excellent tutorials for free access and

download on Apache, PHP, MySQL, SEO, SEM, Open Office, JavaScript and a lot more" />

</HEAD>

<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>

The maximum number of characters written as a value to the attribute CONTENT should be about 255.Just remember that only the first 60 or so are visible on a search engine results page, although more may be indexed.

Here is a simple technique to get Title and Description of a web page correct.

Write the content of the webpage article first. Once done develop its keyword-rich title.

Then write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article.

The description created is used as the value to the DESCRIPTION attribute of the META tag on the page.

Next, strip out all the common words from the description content, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and insert those as values to the KEYWORDS attribute of the META tag.

While Google no longer uses keywords or keyphrases for its page ranking, other search engine still do so leave keywords in anyway. Hence, keywords an impact in your web page ranking.

To summarize, each webpage on a site should have a distinct:
TITLE
And
META description

If even just this minimum is implemented on your web pages, you´re well on your way to better search engine ranking.

Include Keywords In Web Page Headers (i.e. The HTML tags being H1, H2, H3).

When content is laid out on a web page there ought to be a page header. This is page content, which is normally written on the very first line of page content. There will always be only one page header line for web page content.

Subsequently sprinkled within the page content there could be paragraph header line or topic header line.

A paragraph header line is normally used before a set of paragraphs in the web page. Normally these paragraphs all describe a single idea.

A topic header line is normally used within web page content when the idea being described within several paragraphs changes and a new idea has to be described.

Hence, there are three, very specific lines, within web page content that are being targeted here, they are:

Page Header line (normally enclosed within <h1></h1> HTML tags)
Paragraph header line (normally enclosed within <h2></h2> HTML tags)
Topic Header line (normally enclosed within <h3></h3> HTML tags)

Search engines consider keywords that appear within the page header line, paragraph header line and the topic header line sub to be important to the page, so ensure that desired keywords and key phrases appear in these lines as well.

Do not expect any search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines used, it cannot and will not. Instead, place the keywords / key phrases within the H1, H2, and H3 HTML tags to provide clues to the search engine.

NOTE: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That´s a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the web page CSS file rather than creating headline tags with other names or worse creating such line as images.