Search Engine Optimization: Do It Yourself How To’s for Website Positioning, Promotion, Design and HTML Tips to Get Top Search Engine Page Ranking and Highest Search Results Listings, with Best Keyword Use & Correct Page Layout

Posted on July 13th, 2006 by IdeaPro

Click a Star to Rate This Post

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

Loading ...

Email This Post

Print This Post

Subscribe in a Reader

How to Get Top Search Position
with SEO, Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (called SEO) involves building your web pages around a few simple, easy-to-understand rules. These rules help tell your visitors and readers, and also the search engines themselves, what your page is “about”.If you can glance over your page from top to bottom and instantly know precisely what it is about, then you’ve succeeded. Your readers will understand and so will the search engines. This is not difficult. You’ve heard the old K.I.S.S. proverb: “Keep it simple, stupid!” Well, the K.I.S.S. rule certainly applies to building successful self-promoting web pages.

Rules for Optimizing Your Web Pages

Follow these rules to optimize your pages around a particular subject, so that search engines and visitors can understand what your page is about:

Listing the goals of your web site - Develop the overall “main idea” that your web site is based on. Not just this particular page, but the entire web site. For example, if you are promoting a diet plan, and you have a diet recipe book or motivational diet CD to sell, or a diet research newsletter to subscribe to, then your purpose is to sell that book or CD or get subscribers to your newsletter. Those are the main ideas, but that list contains not one idea, but three different ideas. Even though all three things are related, they are 3 different ideas. You will need at least 3 pages to promote those three ideas. For each page you will decide on just one of these ideas, for example selling your diet motivational CD.
Focusing on just the main ideas - Condense all of your “main ideas” into just one overall idea. That single main idea will summarize all of your other ideas and it will be the cover page for your web site. Just like a book, your site has to have a cover. That is your home page. This will tell people what your whole site is “about”. In our example, we will give our web site the name “Super Slim Diet Plan”. We will design a site to promote the “Super Slim Diet Book”, and the “Super Slim Diet Motivational CD”, and to get subscribers to the “Super Slim Diet Research and Success Stories Newsletter”.
Creating your index.html home page or front cover page - To achieve these goals, we will need to create the main cover page, which in the web is called the “home page”. This is a text file saved with the file name “index.htm” or “index.html” on your computer. Windows machines will add the “.htm” automatically if you save the page as a web page in Microsoft Word. If you use other pages, you may need to add the suffix yourself. Macintosh machines can type the full “index.html” name itself in the Save” window when they create the file on their computer. We suggest that Mac owners use the excellent program, called BBEdit to do this. There is a free version of the program, and a very powerful professional program that we highly recommend for people who are serious about web development. You can download BBEdit at http://www.barebones.com/. Otherwise, Windows and Mac users should use any simple text editor or HTML page creation software they like. The idea is to build simple pages that are easy to read and understand.

Contents of your home page index.html file:

Begin your html “index.html” page with two tags - HTML and HEAD.

Next, enter a TITLE tag that describes what your overall web site is about.

This needs to use your main keywords (discussed later), with the most important toward the front of the tag, and less important toward the end. Note that we’ve add the popular keyword phrase “weight loss” to the title, near the front. Be absolutely sure that this tag is 100% unique for each and every page in your web site. If you copy and paste this tag into every page, you will end up losing the web site promotion game. Game over. All your pages will be ranked the same, and that rank won’t be good. When you write different and appropriate title tags for each page in your site, then the search engines will rank them differently, and you will get more traffic. The title tag looks like this:

(title)Super Slim Weight Loss Diet Plan(/title)

This is what will show up in the top margin of the actual window of a visitor’s browser when they open your page. It is also what the search engines show for the link to click to get to your page, when they list your site in search results after a user does a search.

WARNING — Don’t add the URL of your web site to the end or beginning of this title tag like you may see others do. Think about it. This is a completely useless addition to your title. People don’t care about your URL. They are not going to type it into the engines, they are going to click on the title and go directly to your site. Also, the URL is in fact listed in the search engine’s listing, whenever they show your site in their search results. They show the title (to click on), then a short description of the contents of the page (which usually comes from the actual page’s body contents, but sometimes the meta description tag). Then underneath that they show the URL of the page in fine print, which is never clickable.

A META tag called the description tag that describes in about 25 words or less, what this particular page is about. Some search engines use this tag to rank your page, and will show this tag to people when they list your site to searchers. They will print the title tag about as the link to click on, then under it, they will show the META description contents. They won’t print out more than 25 words, sometimes even less. Don’t make this tag too long. Be absolutely sure that this tag is 100% unique for each and every page in your web site. If you copy and paste this tag into every page, you will end up losing the web site promotion game. Game over. All your pages will be ranked the same, and that rank won’t be good. When you write different and appropriate title tags for each page in your site, then the search engines will rank them differently, and you will get more traffic. The description meta tag looks like this in your document:

(META Name=”DESCRIPTION” Content=”Super Slim Diet Plan for weight loss healthy eating: The Super Slim Diet Recipes Book, Super Slim Diet Motivational CD and the free Super Slim Diet Newsletter. Read weight loss research and dieting success stores.”)

Since this decription is 35 words long, it will usually be chopped down or truncated by many search engines. Others may not even use it, or may show just the middle or part of it, depending on the searching user’s actual search terms they wanted to find. Make it short but punchy, and put in two or three of your most important keyword phrases near the front. Make it read properly, since this will actually show up in search engine listings and needs to be understood by real potential visitors.

A META tag called the KEYWORDS tag that is a comma-separated list of the main keyword phrases that pertain to this particular page. Here is a simple list of the actual phrases you think people might type into a search engine trying to find sites like yours. Write this list differently for each new page you create, to list the different keywords for each different page of your site. This list should include the main keywords used in your title and h1 heading, plus a few more that may be found in your h2 subheads, discussed below. You should also include any popular miss-spellings that you think people might enter into a search engine by mistake. For example, deit for diet, and waight for weight. We suggest putting the poorly spelled phrases at the end of the list, since most people should be able to spell correctly. Do not copy and past this tag into all pages. If you do, the search engines will think your pages are all alike and not rank them very highly. The contents meta tag looks like this in your document:

(META Name=”KEYWORDS” Content=”slim,diet plan,weight loss,overweight,losing weight,obesity,fat loss,diet program,motivational diet cd,diet recipes,diet book,diet newsletter,deit,waight”)

This keyword tag list is 14 phrases long. The actual number of keywords you use will depend on your site. If you use too many, they will not be counted as very important by some search engines. Other engines may reject them entirely if too many are used. A few search engines, such as Google, don’t even look at keyword meta tags and don’t use them to develop page rankings for search result display pages. We suggest you make the list contain about 10-20 phrases, and not more than 1,000 characters or letters in total, including the commas in the letter count. Be sure to put the most important phrases in front and the least important at the rear.

WARNING — Do NOT add extra keywords to your keyword phrase list trying to artificially “pump up” or inflate your listing popularity. Use only words that actually relate to the contents of this particular page, not just some popular words that are designed merely to increase hits. If you add words or phrases to this list that are not related to your page contents, you can be downrated, de-listed, or even permanently banned by a search engine. These kinds of phrases will not help you and they can do permanent damage to your search engine popularity.

End the HEAD tag and enter a basic BODY tag for your page. Some body tags are much fancier than this and include many other attributes such as text color, link colors, margin measurements, and so on. However, for this example we just create a simple body tag:

(/head)

(body)

Now we’ve ended the page head area, and we’re now typing the main contents of the page that will be visible to human beings inside their browser window when they visit our site. We will create a main page heading, called the H1 tag, then sub-headings called H2 tags, then sub-paragraphs for each of these headings. This area will contain links to each of our future pages that will specialize on presenting specific contents relating to the goals of our site.

Create a main heading (H1) tag that repeats the same words from the (Title) tag. It is essential that these two tags, the title and h1, perfectly match if possible. These two tags are the main way search engines (and visitors, too usually) understand what your page is about. They compare the title to the h1, and then also compare a complex evaluation of the rest of the page contents using their own private formulas, to develop their idea of what your page is about. While these formulas are never published, we can be sure about one thing: From the search engines’ point of view, your title and headings are the most important features of your pages. Matching your title to your h1 heading, and making them different for each new page, is extremely important.

Most main page H1 headings are centered as shown below. If you want yours left justified, simply remove the “align=center” part of the tag shown. Here is the way you enter a centered main H1 tag for our diet site:

(H1 align=center)Super Slim Weight Loss Diet Plan(/H1)

Notice that this H1 tag perfectly matches the title tag shown above. And notice that they both include our important keyword search phrases “weight loss” and “diet plan”, with the what we think is the most important phrase earlier in the word order. Also notice that we DID NOT include our URL or company name in either of these tags. That is important. People are not searching for our company. They are searching for what our company does or sells. If in fact they DO search for our company, any search engine these days will do a good job of showing them our site at the top of a listing. However, these people already know about us. We are usually not aiming at them. If they want to find us that way, they won’t have a problem. The search engine will take them right to our front page, without us wasting valuable keywords in our duplicated URL listing or repeated company name in headings and page title tags. Don’t do it.

Create subheading (H2) tags, followed by at least one or two matching expanatory sub-paragraphs about the topic of the sub-heading, for each of the sub-points you want to accomplish in your web site. In the example above, we would have a sub paragraph to describe our Overall Super Slim Diet Plan, the another to describe our Super Slim Recipe Diet Book, and a sub-paragraph to describe our Super Slim Diet Research and Success Stories Newsletter.

Together, your TITLE, HEADING, H2 SUB-HEADS and PARAGRAPHS tell the search engine what your page is “about”. It is the “about-ness” that we’re trying to make clear for the search engine. Keeping the page nicely organized and making it clearly “about something” as reflected in the titles, headings and paragraph copy is the way to get a popular page.

Next, we’ll discuss some more important issues, like: