Use keywords and meta tags to get the click!

Now everyone knows that you need to choose keywords and meta tags to make your site search-engine-friendly (dont they?). And pages should be optimised BEFORE you submit them to the search engines.

Optimising your site for the search engines is really not that difficult, but it is important: no-one visits your site if they cant find it on the first few pages of a search engine.

A good way of getting found is to choose high-demand low-supply keywords (like "free nokia ringtones"), and to create pages optimised for those keywords. (Obviously, you need to find keywords relevant to your website.) The basic guidelines, below, show you how to optimise your pages - how to make sure your site gets the click - but how do you find these profitable high-demand low-supply keywords in the first place?


= USE THIS RESOURCE

Wordtracker is a free tool that allows you to brainstorm keywords and determine which of those keywords (if any) have little competition on the net (which are most profitable). You simply add suitable keywords to a basket, and their profitability is determined using AltaVista as the search engine (the paid-for tool determines profitability using all of the major search engines).

Wordtracker is a powerful tool endorsed and used by many so-called search engine experts. You should use it too, to improve your chances of getting the click.

Wordtracker - http://www.wordtracker.com

= THEN STUDY THESE BASIC GUIDELINES

Many of the major search engines behave differently to each other when it comes to choosing the best pages. Worse than this, though, is that some use meta tags and some ignore them completely, preferring only to rely on page content (with weighting given to words at the top of the page). Even worse still, the search engines constantly change their ranking rules (algorithms).

So understand that these are only basic guidelines. However, they should help your web pages rank better with the search engines, *over time*:

- TITLE tag should be between 5 and 12 words

- Meta DESCRIPTION tag should be between 5 and 20 words

- TITLE and Meta DESCRIPTION should be different. Combine both to encourage someone looking at a busy page of search results to click your link, rather than someone elses.

- Meta KEYWORDS tag should be between 0 and 50 words

- HEADING Tags should be used, if possible (and these tags are used for ranking purposes instead of Meta DESCRIPTION tag, sometimes)

- Meta KEYWORDS tag should contain words that exist in TITLE and Meta DESCRIPTION tag (as well as in page content)

- Do not use too many COMMENT tags, or Image ALT tags, especially if you stuff them with keywords

--- sidebar ---

Dont know what the above means? The HTML tags are shown below:

* TITLE - titleYour page title here/title
* DESCRIPTION - meta name="description" content="de scription" /
* KEYWORDS - meta name="keywords" content="key, words" /
* HEADING - H1, H2, H3,...
* COMMENT - --! comments go here or few keywords --

--- end sidebar ---

Again, these are basic guidelines - dont take them too literally. Remember, the most important content for the search engines is also the most important content for your site visitors - *your actual page content*.

= READ MORE...

You can find out a great deal more about keywords, meta tags etc. from the following excellent resources.

- http://spider-food.net
- http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html
- http://www.searchengines.com

Remember that search engines are getting more and more sophisticated. Concentrate on creating valuable keyword-rich pages that your site visitors will like; the search engines will like them too! And your site is sure to get the click!

About the Author

Steve Nash edits Promote! Promote! Promote! a twice-monthly newsletter. Subscribe, and learn more about promoting your business (or site) online: pppromote@getresponse.com This article appears on his latest site called How I Promote My Website - http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com/bin/ap.pl?find-out

:To contact see details below.


smnash@bigfoot.com
http://www.howipromotemywebsite.com/index.html?makingprofit