Top Tips from Some of the Best SEOs in the Business (Part 4 of 5)

Relevancy

There are countless tips for optimizing your pages content so that it will be more relevant to a given search. Each engine ranks pages differently, so most tips are not universal. However, there is one tip that overrides them all: Create pages that emulate the statistics of pages that already rank at or near the top of the search results.

These statistics include:

a) Frequency of the keywords on the page. Tip: This does not mean more keywords are better.

b) Total words on the page. Tip: Mimic the approximate number of words of a top ranking page on your own page.

c) Weight of the keywords on the page. (i.e. frequency divided by the total words) Tip: Too high a weight is just as bad as too low a weight.

d) Area or location of the keywords on the page. (i.e., title, heading, etc.) Tip: A keyword is given more relevance by an engine when the keyword appears in the engines preferred areas.

e) Prominence. Tip: Generally, the closer to the front of the area you can place the keyword, the better.

f) Proximity. Tip: The closer that the words of a phrase appear together, the better.

g) Off-page criteria. (i.e., link popularity, click through popularity, etc.) Tip: Even when youve done everything else right, dont forget the off-page factors! (Brent Winters with FirstPlace Software http://www.webposition.com)

For best positioning, content should be placed at the top of a page. However, for splash pages or pages without any content, content can be added at the very bottom and the scroll bar can be hidden to prevent a visitor from reading the optimized content. (David Johnson and Annam Manthiram with Position Research http://www.positionresearch.com)

Keep the graphics low and the content high. All engines do two things: index text and follow links. Give the spiders the opportunity to do just that. Keep the content as high on the page as possible and give relevant links to quality content either on or off-site. The HTML title should be focused and accurately represent the content of the page. (Marshall Simmonds with About.com http://www.about.com/)

If you run a regional business where most of your business is local, its critical that you include your full company address on every page of your site. Otherwise people could search for Ford dealer in Chicago and youd not appear if your company address is buried only on your contact page. Also take advantage of proximity by putting the word Chicago as close to the phrase Ford dealer as possible.

Lastly, make sure the address is in text form since search engines cant read your address out of a graphical logo on your page. (Brent Winters with FirstPlace Software http://www.webposition.com)

Simplicity

Keep things simple. Write good content and titles, and use text links either as your main navigation or in conjunction with graphic buttons, image maps or flash menus.

Its ok to use Flash animation on your site, but if you use it on your index page, be sure to integrate it with content so the search engines can index your home page.

Also consider making your Flash animations smaller where possible, such as banner size. They are much easier to integrate into a page with content. Flash does not have to dominate the page to be effective or add pizzazz to your site. (Bill Gentry with The Selling Source http://www.sellingsource.com)

Did I mention keeping things simple? General optimization will get you good results without a lot of extra time or effort. (Bill Gentry with The Selling Source http://www.sellingsource.com)

Site Maps

Web Ignite recommends the creation of a site map page that includes plain text links to as many pages within your site as possible. This will increase the ability of search engines to spider your site and can result in more of your pages being listed. A plain text link to the site map should appear on all pages. (Paul Bruemmer with Web Ignite http://www.web-ignite.com)

Software Programs

Consider getting SE Optimizer (http://www.se-optimizer.com). Its a snappy little tool to help you with your optimization efforts and helps remind you of all those things you ought to try to do every time you optimize a page.

(I am not an affiliate of SE Optimizer or AWCS trying to sell you this program. I just really like it and think it belongs in every optimizers tool box.) (Bill Gentry with The Selling Source http://www.sellingsource.com)

Spamming

AltaVista has been vocal lately with the statistic that approximately 95% of all submissions are spam. Therefore, take the time and effort to learn what search engines consider spam and do everything in your power to avoid these violations. It will save much grief if optimization and submission are done properly the first time. (Marshall Simmonds with About.com http://www.about.com/)

Stylesheets

Consider using a stylesheet to redefine html tags and define custom classes. Also make this an external .css file and link to it in the head. Doing so will streamline your source code and make future site-wide style changes much easier.

Also, consider using layers instead of tables to further streamline your source code. Streamlining your source code will make it more search engine friendly and your pages will also load faster. (Bill Gentry with The Selling Source http://www.sellingsource.com)

Use linked Cascading Style Sheets creatively. Using CSS, you can custom define how your HTML tags display text and links, which is a powerful optimization advantage. (J.K. Bowman with Spider Food http://www.spider-food.net)

Tags

Properly done TITLE and META tags at the top of the homepage HEAD section are crucial to your SEO efforts. When applicable, all frameset component pages should contain those tags as well. Properly done ALT text tags are suggested for images. (Paul Bruemmer with Web Ignite http://www.web-ignite.com)

Take one minute, at least, and eyeball every page in your site when you make it, in order to write a descriptive 7-15 word HTML title. Think newspaper headlines! You want to grab the readers attention when they see this title in search engine results and convince them to click through, though you dont want to be misleading.

Look at the page, think of the top 1 or 2 terms youd like it to be found for, then incorporate those words into a title. Dont worry if you go longer than 15 words or shorter than 7.

Those arent limits; just guidelines from my experience on making your titles attractive to readers. What about meta tags?

Use the first sentence or two on your page for your meta description tags content, and in the meta keywords tag, list any important keywords you think the page should be found for and which ALSO appear in the HTML copy of that page. (Danny Sullivan with Search Engine Watch http://www.searchenginewatch.com)

(Continued in Part 5)

About the Author

This article was written by Robin Nobles, a professional freelance writer and the Director of Training at the Academy of Web Specialists academywebspecialists.com). Over the past few years, she has trained several thousand people in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies and has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon. Visit the Academys training Web site to learn more about their online courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.

RobinN@acws.com
http://www.academywebspecialists.com