Your key to success
in online marketing and promotion is your web site. From your title,
keywords, meta tags, and text, to your over all site design, each plays a
very important role when optimizing your site. If your site doesn't rank in
the top 10 or 20 when doing a keyword search at the top search engines, your
target audience won't be able to find you.
About 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from the eight major
search engines. Most people will go to a search engine, type in a keyword or
keyword phrase and look through the top 10 - 20 results. Most of the time
they'll find what they're looking for in the first 10 results. The
percentage of click troughs are even smaller. Listing near the top and
grabbing the attention of your target audience is the top priority. There
are many components of your web page that you should pay close
attention to when preparing it for listing in a search engine.
The first step towards improving your listing is selecting the best keywords
and keyword phrases that best reflect your web page. Keywords are the
foundation of your web presence in the search engines.
* Keywords
To help you choose effective keywords and keyword phrases, there are two
important steps. First of all, get a Thesaurus and investigate synonyms for
your original keywords. Write these words down on a sheet of paper. Next,
perform your keyword and keyword phrases search at the major engines. Pay
close attention to the web sites that rank 1 through 10. View the source
code of these pages. Pay close attention to their placement of keywords in
the <TITLE>, <META> and <ALT> tags. Next, do a search for
your competitor's web sites and view their HTML source code. Noticing
patterns is your key to ranking above them.
* <IMG ALT> Tags
An image alt tag follows your graphic address or url in your html code.
These words will be displayed in place of your graphics through an older
browser or when your visitors have their graphics turned off. To fully
optimize your graphics, insert several of your keywords in the alt tags of
the graphics located at the top of your pages.
Example:
<IMG SRC="wsmain.gif" WIDTH="318"
HEIGHT="62" ALT="Webmaster Resources - Free resources for the
webmaster" BORDER="0">
* <TITLE> Tags
The <TITLE> tag is the first thing that a user sees when your site is
returned by a search query. You only have a split second to grab your
targets attention. Place keywords that are most pertinent to your business
in the title tag. Effective title tags include only relevant keyword or
keyword phrases. Avoid non-indexing filler words, such as a, an, the,
welcome and home page.
Example: <TITLE>Web-Source.net Webmasters Resource Directory - Free
resources for the webmaster - marketing, advertising, promotion, classified
ads & more.</TITLE>.
* <META> tags
<META> tags are HTML code that enable the search engines to determine
what keywords are relevant to this specific site.
The META "description" tag will contain a description of your
site. Make sure your description contains some of your relevant keywords.
The META "keywords" tag will contain a listing of your keywords
and keyword phrases that are relevant to your site and enable a search
engine to find you.
Example:
<META name="description" content="A webmasters resource
directory for 1000's of quality resources to assist the small business owner
in successfully designing, marketing & promoting their products &
services.">
<META name="KEYWORDS" content="webmaster resources, free
ebooks, e-books, ezines, e-zines, publications, media, press release,
content, articles, classified advertising, ads, internet marketing, Internet
promotion, home based business, entrepreneurs">
* Text
Not only are the html tags an important part of optimization, but it is
almost just as important to add plenty of text to your pages. Your text
should contain each of your keywords used in different variations. I.E. If
your keywords are free, promotion, marketing, advertising, Your text might
say something like this; Promotion, Marketing and Advertising are the key to
your success. We offer many promotional resources, including; Free marketing
articles, classified advertising and free promotion.
Optimization will be your solution to winning the search engine wars.
About the author:
Shelley Lowery is the Webmaster of Web-Source.net - A complete resource
portal for the Internet entrepreneur. The site assists the entrepreneur in
developing a serious Web presence by providing a wealth of free information,
resources, tools and content. http://www.web-source.net