Search engine compatible webpages

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Design Website Which is Serch engine compatible.This article gives you complete information to design the website which place ur site in high positeion Before you submit your pages to the search engines, it is crucial that you make sure they are search-engine friendly. Here are some basic tips o­n what to do. Make sure your site is useful! I'm always amazed by how many people miss this simple concept. They spend a huge amount of time trying to get good search engine rankings and lots of visitors, and then what do the visitors find? A poorly designed, badly written website. If there's o­ne bit of advice I wish I could drum into everyone who visits this site, it is this: "It isn't how many 'hits' you get, but how many 'sales' you make." Making your pages "people-friendly" is as important as making them "search-engine" friendly. It's usually much easier to double the effectiveness of your website than it is to double your traffic, and the bottom line result is the same. At the bottom of this article, I'll give you some advice o­n how to do that. But for now, let's talk about what you can do to help out the search engines. Step 1 - Determine your Key Phrases People get obsessive about their keywords. This is wrong. It is difficult if not impossible to get high rankings based o­n keywords. Instead, you need to think about keyphrases. The easiest way to do this is ask yourself "what would someone trying to find me type in when they search?" Make a list of these. Try them out o­n the search engines -- pretend to be someone looking for your product or service. If your business is geographically restricted, then your keyphrases should reflect this. For example, if you are a a real-estate broker in Wilmington, North Carolina, then the key phrase "buying real estate" is a waste of time; instead, the more specific phrase "buying real estate in wilmington north carolina" is what you want to be thinking about. Think about variations o­n the key phrases and write them down. Continuing with our example: real estate in wilmington north carolina real estate brokers in wilmington north carolina buying real estate in wilmington north carolina selling real estate in wilmington north carolina renting real estate in wilmington north carolina home buying in wilmington north carolina house buying in wilmington north carolina selling a house in wilmington north carolina renting a house in wilmington north carolina renting an apartment in wilmington north carolina apartment renting in wilmington north carolina real estate brokers in wilmington nc buying real estate in wilmington nc selling real estate in wilmington nc renting real estate in wilmington nc home buying in wilmington nc house buying in wilmington nc selling a house in wilmington nc renting a house in wilmington nc renting an apartment in wilmington nc apartment renting in wilmington nc real estate brokers in new hanover county buying real estate in new hanover county selling real estate in new hanover county renting real estate in new hanover county home buying in new hanover county house buying in new hanover county selling a house in new hanover county renting a house in new hanover county renting an apartment in new hanover county apartment renting in new hanover county The above is o­nly a partial list, but you get the idea. You can also get a good idea of what keyphrases and page design techniques work well by looking at other pages that do well in the searches you've tried. I discuss how to do that in more detail in my Improving Your Rankings article. Note that this sample list is just a list of possible keyphrases -- we're not going to use all of them because we won't have room. <DIR> One of your fellow users, Stephen Sherman, pointed out an interesting subtlety about keyphrase selection. Let's assume you find a keyphrase that you think people will type in a lot. Try it, and look at the results. If the results seem to be "on topic", then people are likely to drill down several pages to find a listing that is just right for them. This kind of keyphrase is o­ne you want to target, but if you don't get o­n page o­ne, you'll still get traffic. If, o­n the other hand, the results are mostly irrelevant (or full of spammed listings), then people will rarely look at page 2, or even more than the first few listings. These keyphrases are thus not as valuable. This doesn't automatically mean you shouldn't try to target it -- none of the criteria are absolutes -- but it does mean that it will be more difficult to get a useful listing with that keyphrase. </DIR> Two great resources for finding out what keyphrases are the most effective are the Overture.com Search Suggestions Page and WordTracker . o­n Overture's search suggestion page, you just type in a very general keyphrase (like "real estate") and it tells you all of the more specific keyphrases that relate to that keyphrase and how many hits they got. Using our example of selling real estate in Wilmington, NC and entering "real estate" into the Overture tool, I found that in October 1999, the broad keyphrase "real estate" was searched for 67016 times (on Overture). However, you'd never want to target that keyphrase, because you don't care if someone in Kalamazoo wants real estate; you're o­nly interested in people who want houses in Wilmington. Looking down the list of results, I found that "north carolina real estate" got 489 searches. That's a possibility. Doing a search suggestion o­n "wilmington" revealed several hundred hits o­n "wilmington north carolina," "wilmington nc" and related topics. Zooming in even further, getting a suggestion o­n "wilmington real" found 36 hits o­n specific queries related to real estate in wilmington, NC. These queries obviously don't get a huge amount of traffic, but because they're so focused o­n what you're trying to do, they're often the best o­nes to target. <DIR> Side note: If you've read my Overture page or my page o­n Search Engine Trends  then you know I'm a big fan of pay-per click services like Overture. The top position o­n those nice, juicy specific queries o­n Overture could be had for a nickel each. Such a deal! Yeah, you might o­nly get 10 visits a month by sponsoring "wilmington real" but each o­ne would be looking for exactly what you're selling - at a cost of five cents per pre-qualified visitor! Recent changes at Overture have made it a lot less valuable for highly targeted advertisers, however. Read these other pages for more information. </DIR> Those of you who have contributed and gained access to the Secret Net Tools will want to check out the Keyword Susser tool, which will do multiple queries using the Overture.com Search Suggestions system and merge the results. It's a really great way to find out what your keyphrases actually are. WordTracker goes a bit further. It helps you develop lists of relevant keyphrases, ranked by their popularity. It then queries the major search engines to determine which keyphrases are the least competitive. It's usually not much use targeting a popular keyphrase (lots of searches) if there are millions of other pages that contain that keyphrase. o­n the other hand, a relevant keyphrase that o­nly gets a few searches a day but which has o­nly a few pages competing for it is a good candidate, because it will be much easier to get a high ranking. WordTracker has a free trial that will give you a lot of information, and additional services available by subscription - including some great tools for working with Overture. <DIR> Disclaimer: WordTracker pays me a commission o­n any income generated from clickthroughs from SelfPromotion.com, but as usual, I donate all such income to the Salvation Army in order to preserve my editorial independence. </DIR> My advice is to use the Overture tool to get a rough idea what your keyphrases should be (and find o­nes you might not have thought about), and then use WordTracker to determine which o­nes you really should be targeting - and (this is key!) to rank them in order of importance. OK. At this point, you know what your best keyphrases are. You've got your list. You've checked it twice. Now it's time to use it! 2 - Crafting your <TITLE> tag Most people make the mistake of using a page title that's good for people but lousy for the search engines. Big mistake. A title like "Bill Phillips - Real Estate Broker" is a disaster! The golden rule is this: All your most important keyphrases should be in the TITLE tag. So what you do is look at your keyphrases, make a list of all the important words, and create a title tag that uses them. Also, keep in mind that browsers o­nly display the first few words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So while the first sentence of your title tag should be "human readable", the rest can be just a list of keyphrases. There is some debate as to whether a very long title tag is a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to search engines. Some people are concerned that a very long title tag might result in the search engines deciding the page is a "spam page." I'm waffling o­n this issue right now. Based o­n the available (scanty!) evidence, my advice is to keep the title between 15 and 20 words. But you might want to try longer title tags o­n some of your pages, just to see what happens! So Bill Phillips might have a title that looks like this: <TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - New Hanover County - Buying Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Office</TITLE> The reason for this is that the three most important places to have keyphrases and phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You want them to all contain the same important words; this increases your keyphrase density and improves your rankings. 3 - The Meta Tags The fabled Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and o­n many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed. Meta tags go in the <HEAD> section of the HTML page (the same section as the <TITLE> tag). The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web-page. Guess what? You've already written o­ne for the <TITLE> tag! So just edit that to make it totally human readable (and perhaps a little shorter), and you're done. The format of a Meta description tag is simple. It looks like this: < meta name="description" content="whatever you want to place here"> So, in our example, we might use: < meta name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments, Commercial Property and Office Space"> My advice o­n the length of this description is keep it between 100 and 200 characters. Remember: the description tag should be written for humans to read. It should not be a list of keywords! The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your keyphrases, and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times or so. This may mean that you can't use some of your better keyphrases. The reason why you don't want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. Search engines aren't as sensitive to keyword repeating as they used to be (most of them ignore extra repeats), but play it safe. The exception is common "noise" words like "the", "in", "a", "and" and so o­n. Most search engines ignore them. Leave them in, but don't worry if you have more than 5 of any of them. If you've got a lot of keyphrases that really are relevant to your site, the best thing to do is build "theme" pages devoted to a particular keyphrase or set of keyphrases. This is good for you, good for your visitors, and appreciated by the search engines. Use the most important keyphrases o­n your homepage. Some people get confused about whether to use commas between phrases, and whether to capitalize keywords. The truth is, some search engines pay attention to the commas, some don't. But the o­nes who don't treat them as "white-space". So just use commas as appropriate, but don't waste a character putting a space after the comma. Similarly, just capitalize words as you might expect people to normally use them. Most search engines will ignore the capitalization, but it can't hurt to help out those that make note of it. If you want to get really fancy, play the cunning comma trick. The search engines that don't pay attention to commas sometimes pay attention to sequences of words. So if you can put two keyphrases together with a comma between them, and the last words of the first keyphrase coupled with the first words of the next keyphrase make up o­ne of your keyphrases, then you've gotten 3 keyphrases for the price of two! Normally, however, this is difficult, so don't waste too much time over it. Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200-400 characters. Unfortunately, this means you may not be able to include all of your key phrases in your meta keywords tag even if you don't repeat a word too often. The theme pages concept deals with this also. After pruning away, our sample keywords tag might look like this: < meta name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in wilmington north carolina,new hanover county,south-east north carolina,house broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental"> 4 - The first paragraph The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon everything in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your visitors, so you want to make a good impression. Try to put this first paragraph as close to the <BODY> tag as possible. Avoid putting graphics or other HTML in front of your first paragraph as much as you can. I don't have a banner ad o­n my homepage for this reason. Also, use the <H1> or <H2> tag to emphasize your opening sentence (but make sure it looks tasteful!). Bill Phillips might use the following opening paragraph: <H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington, North Carolina?</H2><BR> If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home, apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me to be your guide. 5 - Don't Go Overboard - and whatever you do, don't put up spam pages! You clearly want to have your important keyphrases o­n your page more than o­nce, because this is what gives the search engines a clue as to what your page is really about. But you don't want your keyphrases to appear too many times, because that might make the search engines think your page is a spam page trying to rank highly for a particular phrase. The question then becomes, how much is too much? And the answer is, nobody knows for sure, and it's going to be different from search engine to search engine. Rumor has it that Google likes pages with less than 13 repeats of a keyphrase, for example. My advice is to try and keep the number of repeats of important phrases down to 10 or less; this means all instances, in title, meta tags, and the text of the page. Sometimes this simply isn't possible, because the phrase is so integral to your topic, so don't get paranoid about this. Just keep it in mind. There are certain classes of sites and pages that the big guys consider spam, and either won't list, or will penalize. The major indexes consider the following kinds of sites to be spam and will not list them: Affiliate sites with same or similar content but a different site designs. Mirror sites. Submitting mirror URLs to different categories is also considered spam. Multi-lingual sites are acceptable as long as the URL resolves to the appropriate language. Sites that use redirects or any type of bait-and-switch practice. Using frames to hide a real URL, commonly referred to as "poor man's cloaking," is also considered spam. Sites whose sole purpose is to drive traffic to affiliate links or sites that contain these types of links. Sites without original content. Sites that are repeatedly resubmitted (over 5 times) without being accepted. In addition, the major search engines are actively penalizing/banning sites that employ the following techniques: Web pages that are built primarily for the search engines and not your target audience, especially machine-generated pages. Pages that contain hidden text and hidden links. "Great quantity and little value" pages. Link farming and link spamming, particularly free-for-all (FFA) links. Cloaking, a practice in which the search engine and the end user do not view the same page. Sites with numerous, unnecessary host names (i.e. poker.abc.com, blackjack.abc.com, etc.). Excessively cross-linking sites to artificially inflate a site's apparent popularity. Affiliate spam. People who repeatedly submit spam sites to the big guys have not o­nly been blacklisted, but in some cases, their previously submitted (and legitimate) sites have been removed. So be nice to the Indexes, and they'll be nice to you. And credit where credit is due: Chris Sherman's SearchDay Newsletter is the place to find out what works -- and what doesn't -- with the search engines. Do yourself a favor and check it out Please Click if you like this on google plus.