{title}...{/title}

This tag is a winner. This is a primary spot to include our keywords for SE spiders, bots or crawlers ("spider" hereafter). {title} tags are the best "dainty dish" for SE spiders. They eat them like cakes, so make the title tags tasty for them, about 65 characters long.
(article continued below ...)
 

{meta name=description content="..."}

This is another important Meta tag. Very often the description you put will be shown at the SE searching results. In my personal opinion, this tag has an important marketing role in attracting visitors rather than actual optimization. The SEs' trust in "description" tag as well as our next "keywords" tag has been greatly discriminated due to fraud and unfair competition. Make it no more than 250 characters long, including, of course, your targeted keywords as well.

{meta name=keywords content="..."}

This Meta tag all your targeted and untargeted key phrases that are related to the topic, separated by commas. Note that highly popular and stand alone keywords like "web-site", "internet", "business" etc. will give you nothing more than increase the size of your web-page. I won't be mistaken, if I say that about several millions of web-pages have them. Don't overuse your keywords as well, spiders don't like to be forced to eat what they don't want to.

{meta name=author content="..."}{meta name=copyright content="..."}{meta name=language content="..."} etc.

Subsidiary Meta tags that are used more likely to satisfy webmasters' ego, rather than bring any real help in rankings.

{h1}...{/h1} {h2}...{/h2} {h3}...{/h3}

In contrary to the previous tags the importance of, let's call them, "body" tags have substantially risen for simple reason: they are readable to visitors. Also, it is harder to cheat SE with these tags than Meta description or keywords tags where any webmaster may put anything s/he wants. Given that these tags determine the headers of your web-page from the SE spiders' viewpoint, try to include your targeted keywords in them.

{img src=: alt="..."}

"Alt" is just a comment for every image you insert into the page. Use this knowledge at your advantage. Include your key phrases where possible and safe. By "safe" I mean common sense, don't input comment like "ebook package" into the image of the button that leads to your partner, say, "Pizza ordering" web-site. On the contrary, if your web-site has graphical menu and buttons, it is very wise to include "alt" comments according to directions they lead to, i.e. "Home", "Services", "About Us", "Contacts" etc. If for any reason visitors have their browser with images turned off, they won't see any menu if you haven't inserted "alt" comments.

Content

Your informational coverage should be keyword/phrase rich, the same way as headers. In general the more relevant key phrases your textual information will contain, the better your chances of being "remarked" by SE spider are.

HTML text format tags like bolding {b}, italic type {i} and underlining {u} may also have some weight in SEs placement.

Key word density and frequency are another indexes vastly used by SE to rank web-pages. Don't overuse them though.

Link popularity (page rank)

Another extremely important parameter for your listing position is your link popularity. In general the more links on third party web-sites point to your site the better. Although try to avoid "link farms" or other "clubs'  whose only only aim is to artificially increase your link popularity. These tactics may simply result in penalization or banning of your web-site.

Link popularity without any doubt helps to increase the relevance of searched terms more often than it doesn't, but makes SEO even more far-reaching target, because establishing quality "incoming" links pointing to your site is beyond your direct power.

Your task is to find web-sites that have the highest SE listing positions and/or page rank (determined via Google Toolbar) and negotiate a link to your site in return for some service, product or solicit simple exchange of links. As you see these "manual" work is the most time-consuming, but it repays if you are focused to get as much relevant links as possible.

You may apply viral strategies by offering some free/paid service that implies putting a link back to your site.

Google has developed its own link popularity evaluation tool called Page Rank. It is calculated based on consistently changing number rules: current rank of the site the link to your page is pointing from, its relevance to your web-site topic, presence of targeted words etc.

Fake tactics

They are what I call them and used by webmasters similar to ways some "marketers" use spam to promote their businesses.

Unfortunately, ordinary Internet users don't have the ability to "ban" spammers the same way SEs penalize those "smart" webmasters. I don't recommend you to use any of these tactics, even on someone's "advice".

They include excessive use of related and totally unrelated keywords, comment tags, hidden layers, text on the background of the same color, artificial link farms, numerous entry pages etc. This game simply won't be worth candles if your web-site is banned for good.

robots.txt file

Very important file every web-site should have. It allows you to literally rule or direct SE spider to the "proper" places, explaining what and where should be scanned, not just blind waiting of your lucky day. With its help you can also protect your confidential web-pages and or directories from scanning and showing at the SE searching results, very important feature many web-masters solve with "tons" of Java or even Perl coding instead of one line string in the robots.txt file that will forbid to scan "download", so-called "thank you" pages or anything you want!

You can find general rules of creating robots.txt file here http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Design & Layout issues

Next point is to have a textual info. The simple declaration of content rich web-site is not enough, SEs need text to scan.

Clear to follow links. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well. Most SE spiders cannot distinguish dynamically created web-pages with the help of ASP, Perl, PHP or other languages. It is also clear that all web-pages, access to which was forbidden (no matter how) by administrator, would also be left unnoticed. The same relates to HTML frame sites. What frames actually do is complicate the way web-site is being scanned, no more, no less. When I see web-site made of frames, it is like webmaster telling me: "I want lower SE position."

Because of the excessive work spiders have to do in order to scan as many pages as possible, their scanning "accuracy", if we can say so, have dropped, so they will hardly scan each and every of your pages from the very top to the bottom, it is more likely to be selective scanning, so, to ease this process you should try to arrange the most valuable info, including header tags and text at the very top of web-pages. Having "site map" page with all link connections of your site not only does it help your potential visitors, but SEs as well.

All link names, inside your informational content, are to contain your related keywords or phrases, not just "click here" or "download here".

Avoid a lot of javascripts, cascade style sheet tags or a lot of image tags at the top of the page that could occupy more than a page of HTML source code with almost no textual info. If you have java or .css coding save them as separate files and upload on request, leaving one string of code in your HTML document only. This tactic is also very smart considering general web-page optimization and space saving purposes.

Allow to the Internet market to know your business better.

PART 1 OF THE ARTICLE

About the Author:

Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur, founder of ASBONE.com, where you can find everything to make your business prosper. Discounted Internet services, FREE ebooks http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/ FREE reports http://ASBONE.com/reports/ 

November 2, 2003