Open source training & tutorials from experienced, passionate people
By A Web Design
Carefully position your keywords in the first paragraph of the body text of your web page if possible. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document. The first paragraph is a place where a lot of content creators write an introduction about the content of the page.
NOTE: Please do not artificially stuff keywords in the first paragraph. More is definitely not better with search engines. To keep Google happy keep a keyword density in the entire body text of maybe up to 2% for a word that should rank high, do not overdo it Google does penalize websites that stuff keywords in body content hoping to get a high search engine result page ranking.
Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT attribute of image tags where possible. This helps make the web page more accessible to site-impaired visitors and gives additional clues to the search engines. Using the ALT tag attributes judiciously does help get web page images ranked higher for image search in Google and other search engines that offer such a service.
Use keywords in Hyperlinks created in web pages. Search engines are looking for clues to try and figure out what the content of your web page is focused on. When search engines discover hyperlinked words in the content of a web page, they consider these hyperlinks potentially important, so hyperlink your keywords and keyphrases.
To emphasize a keyword or key phrase even more, the webpage being hyperlinked to could it’s have its Title with the same keyword or key phrase. This offers another clue for the search engine.
Using well planned and executed Search Engine Optimization (SEO), i.e. grooming your pages to make them search engine friendly, does helps your business.
JavaScript drop down navigation menus that appear when you hover the mouse cursor on them are great for humans, but terrible for search engines as they do not read JavaScript very well. The same goes for Flash menus.
Always ensure that you have the very same menu system at the bottom of your web page built entirely in HTML. Ensure that simple HTML hyperlinks exist at the bottom of your web page that takes a search engine spider from your HOME page to every other page on the web site.
Create pure CSS driven menus at the top of the page in instead of using Javascript. CSS driven menus can be very attractive and are quite light weight when they run.
Do not set up your web site navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach). HTML frames can cause severe indexing problems.
Today a very large number of web sites are built using some sort of content of Content Management System (CMS). Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, Magneto are some of the names that come to mind.
CMS permit website content to be created by people with little or no programming skills. If you know how to use a word processor like M.S. Word you can update web site content using a CMS.
CMS produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly web pages extracted on request from a DBMS associated with the CMS. Regretfully, most CMS structure page URL’s in a way that is very search engine unfriendly.
As far as the CMS is concerned, on receipt of the strangely formed URL requested from a Browser they will correctly deliver the web page requested, but the search engine spider that is trying to identify your web page to index it gets completely foxed.
NOTE: Google has fixed this issue fixed. Hence the Google spider does correctly index CMS delivered pages with search engine unfriendly URL’s, but then Google is not the only search engine the rest of the search engines simply cannot be ignored.
NOTE: Most CMS’s of today have some sort of plug-in that extends their functionality to deliver search engine friendly URL’s. Most of such plugins are available free, some are paid for but the charges are pretty modest.
If you find the search engines are not indexing your interior pages, you might consider creating a site map for your website which is an excellent solution to this issue, URL rewriting, a suitable plug in for your CMS to help it deliver search engine friendly URL’s, or other commercial solutions.
A site map is a special page on your website. A site map is especially created with search engines in mind, but also useful to site visitors.
This page has links to all the pages on the website and is a great help to search engines (and visitors) to help them locate the all your web site pages, particularly if you have a large site.
There are several excellent a free tools site map creation tools.
Take a look at XML-Sitemaps.com to create XML sitemaps that can be referenced by all major search engines to index the pages of your web site accurately.
Upload your sitemap to your website and link this a menu item which when clicked automatically generates the site map and delivers the page to the requester.
You could, if you wished, submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (formerly MSN), following instructions on their sites.
NOTE: Google Webmaster Central (www.google.com/webmasters/) has lots of tools to help your web site get ranked higher. Be sure to set up a free account and explore what they have to offer.
Develop Web Pages Focused On Each Of Your Target Keywords
It really is a great idea to develop several web pages on your site, each of which is focused on a target keyword or key phrase for which you would like a high ranking.
Let's say you sell teddy bears.
Use Google Insights for Search ( www.google.com/insights/search/)
OR
The free keyword suggestion tool on Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/)
To find the related keywords / keyphrases that people search on when they are looking for Joomla tutorials or Wordpress tutorials, PHP tutorials and so on.
NOTE: Please take a quick look at Lesson 4 - Using tools to obtain keywords which details how to use these tools.
Then craft a separate webpage which features the keywords that the tools indicate that seekers are keying in when they are searching for Joomla tutorials or Wordpress tutorials, PHP tutorials and so on.
You perhaps cannot fully optimize all the web pages in your site, but for each of these special focused-content web pages, do spend lots of time tweaking their page content (i.e. adding keywords or keyphrases or replacing keywords or keyphrases) to help improve their ranking in search engines.
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