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 (don't 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 can't 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 else's.

- 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

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Don't know what the above means? The HTML tags are shown below:

TITLE -