Doing the search engines optimization (SEO) part 2

By Blaz Banic

Besides the things mentioned in the previous post, it is also god to consider the following things when optimizing your site for the search engines:

• META tags. Meta tags are meant for the browser or the search engine to know certain things about the web site you want them to know. Here we'll look at the most important parameters of the meta tags: "description", "keywords", and "robots". The most important is the meta description tag. Some of the major search engines (Yahoo!) still use it for your description in the results pages. It is good to write a short description of your site and use your main keywords in them. But remember, only use each keyword once or the engine will consider your description spamming!

The syntax for this is as follows:

[META name="description" content="This site is about internet marketing."]

Be sure to change the [ and ] into <>.

Try to describe your site a bit better though ;)

The second meta tag we mentioned is a bit less important, but still some search engines use it, so it's worth making it as it will only take you a few minutes. This is the meta keywords tag. Remember to use only a few keywords, each only once, and make sure that those keywords appear in your web site copy. Yu separate the keywords wit a comma.

The syntax is as follows:

[META name="keywords" content="marketing, web site traffic"]

The last meta tag I would like to explain is the meta robots tag. It is used by all the search engines and is only effective if you don't want the web site to be crawled. This could prove useful if you are giving a web site based newsletter and would only like your subscribers to find it (through your e-mail). Sometimes people link to your newsletter which can result in a crawler visiting and indexing the site you don't want indexed. This meta tag will solve the problem:

[META name="robots" content="noindex"]

Make sure you put your meta tags between the HEAD tags of your web site and change [ ] into <>.

• Put your keyword also in the alt parameter of your image tags. Again, don't overdo it and don't use the same keyword in two or more images. It is also a good thing to include another word so that the search engine won't think you're spamming. If your keyword is "make money", put alt="make money header" in the header graphic img tag . For this web site the alt tag might be something like this:

[IMG src="yourimage.gif" alt="marketing secrets logo"]

• Linking strategy inside your web site. For Yahoo! it is more important that the links to a certain site are coming from other sites of the same web page. Simply make many web pages and link to the index page using your preferred keyword in the anchor text. Remember, only one such link per site. They have to be good content pages too. Google on the other hand will not put so much weight on this and will rather see links from entirely different web sites. So you have to have both in order to succeed with the search engines.
• But whatever you do, remember that good content is the most important and the most surefire way to make your web site rank high in the search engine. Make if original, fresh and very informative and your readers will visit often and link to your site thus making it more important to search engines.