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Improving your search-engine status - Part 2
The search-engine spiders which visit your site may be after two sorts of information. Firstly: what your pages say to visitors. Secondly: what your pages say about themselves.
Let us turn initially to the second of these, to the information provided by your pages about themselves Your pages can provide such information in three different ways.
The words you place in this tag will not show up on your page (they may show at the top of the browser window), but are important for search engine indexing. Here is an example:
<TITLE>Buy yellow sponge ducks online</TITLE>
Meta tags are pieces of HTML code, typically placed between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags in a page. The description meta tag contains the page description you would like your target audience to see after running their search. An example:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Bath Stuff Inc - manufacturers of the famous yellow sponge duck, based in Sheffield, UK">
This should contain the search terms and phrases you think your target audience will use. An example:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Yellow sponge duck, bath stuff">
Some tips on meta tags:
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Some search engines don't read meta tags beyond a certain size. Try to get all the content you need into 256 characters.
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Place your keywords in order of importance, since they may be so ranked by the search-engine.
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If you want your page to appear in response to a certain phrase, include this in your keywords as a phrase rather than as a single keywords. For instance, if you think that your target audience will search on the phrase 'yellow duck sponge' then include in your keywords tag '...,yellow duck sponge, ...' rather than '...,yellow,duck,sponge,...'
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Repeating keywords may increase your rating with certain search engines, but overdoing it runs the serious risk of being banned by them.
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You may want to include any popular misspellings of keywords. For instance, no American spells 'colour' in the way that it patently ought to be spelt.
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Be careful with including dubious keywords, for instance the names of your main competitors. This 'metajacking' is looked down on, not least by the law.
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Some search engines are case-sensitive, some aren't. Repeating keywords in different cases may be good for the former, but runs the risk of looking like excess repetition to the latter.
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When composing page descriptions, bear in mind that your potential audience is global, and may have all kinds of background preconceptions. So try to be precise in your descriptions, and include location information if relevant.
Let's now turn from what your pages say about themselves, to what they say to visitors (ie, the page's general contents). This is especially important for Google, which only looks at page contents and ignores meta tags.
Search-engine crawlers have more or less sophisticated algorithms for indexing your page contents. But their aim is to find out what your pages are about, and to do so they will look for various cues. For example, they are likely to suppose that important words and phrases will come near the top of the page; that these words and phrases may be repeated; that they may be emphasised or placed in headings.
Knowing that crawlers pick up on these kinds of cues allows you to write page content emphasising them. So here are some tips:
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Aim to have your key words and phrases throughout your page, and clustered near the top. But note that overdoing this to spoof the search engine will be taken badly. A good rule of thumb is to make your text about 3 percent keywords.
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Especially, don't pack your page with search terms where these have been hidden by making them the same colour as the background. This is an old trick, and they've seen it before.
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If your site is very picture-heavy, then include your descriptive text in the 'ALT' property of your <IMG> tags.
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Consider putting your most important keywords and phrases into heading tags, or in a larger font size.
next part
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