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Better Search Engine Placement |
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Suggestions for Optimizing Search Engine PlacementTitle meta tag - Keep your page titles short and relevant to the web pages content. A great title meta tag will contain between 3 - 9 words with a maximum 60 - 80 characters total, including spaces.
Description meta tag - should contain 25 - 30 words that use a maximum of 160 - 180 characters relevant to content on the page.
Keywords meta tag - should contain keywords and phrases from title, meta description, keadning, and first two paragraphs of page. You should try to limit words to 15 - 20. The meta description tag is not as important to search engine placement as in the past.
Heading tags - Every page should start with an H1 heading at the very top of the page. Actual size is not as important as having the tag with prime keywords and phrases. For example, a default H1 tag may look out of place on a web page but we use them to start every single web page on this site. We control the size of all meta tags using CSS. Using CSS to control the look of the web site allows us to set the font size, color, etc for each tag we use. As such, we set the H1 tag to only be slightly larger than our paragraph fonts.
Alt Attribute - this tag is required by accessability laws, compliance and also by HXML Standards. Do not use keywords in your alt tags. All images and links should contain alt tags. Limit alt tags to approximately 70 80 characters. If you need to use more than 70 - 80 charactors, use the logdesc tag instead of alt.
Alt tags are often misunderstood and a lot of web programmers will simply enter code such as:
<img src=logo.jpg alt=our business logo>
The above is not correct!!! The alt tag really provides no description at all of the image, and unless the person visiting your web site has actually seen your image, they would have no clue what it was from that alt tag. The correct usage would be:
<img src=logo.jpg alt=main top blue and black header image that shows network and world montage along with our customer service representative>
The above alt tag used here is much better. You will notice the difference as that the second examples alt tag provides a visual description of the image and doesnt just tell what it is.
Hyperlinked text - this is often overlooked but is a huge help in better search engine placement. The way spiders and robots work is that they index the main page of a web site and follow the links on that page. They do not always follow the links on additional pages, so always use hyperlinked text links to your most important parts of your web site. For an example of hyperlinked test, just look at the bottom of our web pages. You can place hyperlinked text for best visability at the top, bottom, left, or right sides of pages and you should use short, consise keywords and phrases for them.
Content is King - most search engines today could care less about what is in your meta descriptions and the content is king term is often used to describe what is important for better placement. Simply put, the content of your web site and the frequency that it changes. TIP: You should also list the last modified date on all content. I dont know why this works, but it does. Here is an example of the correct format for last modified dates:
Last Modified: 2004-11-26T12:19:34-0800
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 02 December 2004 )
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