The 7 Most
Basic Optimization Techniques
These are general instructions for any page you consider important:
1. First, you must decide what 2-4 keyword phrases are absolutely relevant to
the page.
2. Optimize the <title> tag in the html. This is the text that appears first in
search engine results and it is also a clickable link. It must be compelling: it
must encapsulate **only that page's contents** and what benefit the user can
expect from visiting **that page**. It should be keyword-rich yet not attempt to
mislead. Remember that the engines see, or use, only about the first 10 words.
Placement matters, so use the most important words first if possible.
3. Write a meta description tag and place it in the <head> section of the html.
Write 2-4 complete sentences that describe the page more fully and entice the
user to visit. The engines **might** use all or part of this if it seems to
match the user's query (although it's doubtful that the page would rank well if
similar text is not also on the page).
4. Optionally, write a meta keywords tag in the same section. The engines ignore
this tag because historically it was abused. If you do use it, write only the
words that are relevant to that page, write them in phrases separated by commas, and
be sure to include possible misspellings and geographical names if relevant.
5. Whatever keyword phrases each page is optimized for should be present in or
around incoming links. On other sites this is not always possible but on your
own site you control how you present the links. One way to be able to show more
descriptive text around links is to put a complete listing on a site map, and
this is also helpful for users.
6. Do not use framesets. They just make it more difficult for engines to index,
and are user-UNfriendly to boot.
7. Have relevant filenames and directory names whenever possible, but don't
change names if the pages are already indexed.
I hope you find these basic guidelines helpful. It's not really that complicated
to present your web pages in such a way that the search engines can understand
what they're about and index them accordingly.
That said, SEO has become so hypercompetitive, it's no longer enough to do the
basics. You must also try to get traffic through incoming links from other
sites. I usually recommend participating in a pay-per-click ad program (PPC) as
well. If you'd like my help setting up an effective PPC program for you at
Google, learn more here.
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