Optimize your websites searchability
Article source:zackles.com
Search engine optimization is different than it used to be. In the good ol' days a SEO could simply be to apply clever keyword meta tags and get a decent page rank. It was also possible to use many inside tricks to get high ranking but, those days are now gone although there are many new tricks and loopholes that can still be utilized in today's SEO, the risk of using them may not be worth it in the long run.
Today it takes alot of time and effort to even have a fighting chance to be found by keywords, especialy if your website is just starting out. However, there are many things you can do to optimize your search results, Page title and meta description being the number one starting point.
Page titles and content:
You probably came across this page from the link on the How to optimize your search results page. Or you may have searched the term "How to use page titles and meta tag descriptions to optimize my search results" You may notice the page title in the browser is worded differently than the link you clicked on. The reason for this is, How to use page titles and meta tag descriptions to optimize "my" search results, is used more often then just page title and meta tag descriptions. Since this is a SEO help page most people searching this will be asking this specific question so, our page title is designed to match that search phrase exactly when someone types it in. Get it?
Instead of using meta keywords for people to find our pages, we use entire pages to act as our keywords and descriptions. Some people consider this as a doorway page and say it's balck hat SEO but, if your content is relevant to your site, this is simply optimizing and should be considered as an ethical SEO practice. Search engine spiders like content relevant to the search term so, it is important that you concentrate your pages to one or two search terms per page and use text describing for those search terms only.
Usually when a key word from your site is found you will see the page title in the menu, like Contact us followed by a description and finaly your url at the bottom. This is why it is so important to use your page title as your keyword. You can also use different pages of the same subject slightly adjusted to avoid duplicate content. Also use a different page title, Example: "How to use page titles and meta tag descriptions to optimize my search results" is similar to another page on this site entitled "How to get higher page rank using meta tags" and there is another page very similar called "How to optimize my search using keywords" along with several others. Do not use the same content, make sure to adjust it to fit in with the page title and also keep your keyword density in mind, too much is worse than too little. You may only want to apply this strategy only to your top keywords and phrases as it is very time consuming to do this right.
Meta tag descriptions:
Although meta keywords are pretty much useless for today's SEO meta "descriptions" are a key element to getting people to come to your site since that is what people will see in their search results. Let's say your page is about boxer bulldogs, a person may overlook a decription that says, "boxers, dogs, boxer dogs, boxer bull dogs, and more" They may also overlook a desription that says, "This site is dedicated to breeding, grooming, caring for, feeding, and training box..............." Keep your description short so you don't run out of room halfway through the page description. An ideal meta tag description would be "This site is all about breeding and training boxer bull dogs"
Make sure to only describe the particular page. There is no reason to talk about collars and leashes if the page is only about breeding and training, crawlers seem to frown upon pages with irelevant descriptions. Remeber keep your meta tag descriptions short, understandable, and relevant to the content of the page, do that, and you'll see more and more visitors all the time, which of course will lead to higher page rank.
Make your web pages relevant to the key words used to find them:
It is important to make your web pages relevant to the keywords used to find it. Search engines love content that describes the word or phrase that was searched.
Let's say your page is about sandals, if you start talking about tennis shoes and boots, this will be a complete waste of time and space. If your selling sandals, then your page should only be about sandals.
Try to use keywords relevant to sandals in different variations, sandals, best sandals, sandal sale, and words like that.
Using original content can play a vital role in SEO to get found on the top search engines. To begin with, crawlers love fresh content to find, if your site has alot of copied text then the crawler may find the original writer and bypass your site. Yes, it is very time consuming to write your own stuff especialy if your site is to have many pages but, it's well worth the time when it comes to getting found.
You can start pages with just a little and come back to them when you think of something elses that needs to be added. A page with one original sentence is better than an entire copied article. Another factor is often people remember the names and phrases of certain pages or articles they were reading but, may not remenber the website. If that individual wants to go back to that page to read more and searches the title, they will be directed to the original writers site and not yours.
Great articles for web pages can be valuable for SEO. If you want to submit or syndicate your article to a blog or press release service, it must be original in order to be found in searches. For example, you may notice alot of news sites use the associated press for their articles, let's say the washington post runs an article and the headline is "BP ignoring families of from oil rig explosion" if you search the headline you may be directed to the associated press's website before the washington post.
One danger in using other peoples content is they may not know untill you out rank them, once they discovered what you've done they will most likley start a campaign to bring you down. Although you can do the same and pretty much start a war,this is just a headache and you want to avoid conflict at all cost as it is not very profitable for either party.
Make sure your tags are for your top key words:
To give you an example of what I'm talking about, this articles top keywords are Page, search, and meta. I will include these keywords in my tags. The next words are Keywords, optimize, and SEO, these keywords only make up a small percentage. Although I would like this article to be found for SEO and optimize, I can not ad any more to it as it will become unreadable and hard to understand. A usefull article is always better than just a keyword rich article. To give you an example, one site owned by zackles is a news website, after the BP incedent there was an article written about the deadly gases coming from the oil plume. A major phrases in driving traffic to that article was "what bp is not telling us" "what bp is hiding" "deadly gases from oil spill " and several others. We were getting top 5 results from these phrases "and trust me, these searches were very hot for a while" What I'm saying is, the keyword density from these phrases didn't even make up 1% of the ratio in the article, in fact, we were getting great results from prases that wasn't even in it. If you search it you can see we were competing with the big boys like, reuters, associated press, and bloomberg, just to name a few. What this means is, you only need to focus on helpfull and informative writings instead of just stuffing keywords.
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