Web Resources > Driving Traffic > Search Engines > Page Optimization

Having good keywords, title and description is not enough to rank highly with search engines, unless your web site relates to something that is very uncommon. Below are some tips to help you optimize your pages.

Keywords

Having your META tags defined is not enough to score highly in the search engines. Each search engine uses it own ranking methods, but they all match the phrase searched for with the overall content of your page.

Before you attempt to optimize your own pages, look at your competition, the sites that rank highly in the search engines. You can use "view-source" in explorer to look at the HTML of the page and look at their keywords and description. To do a deep analysis you will need to check the density of keywords and phrases in their pages.

Your title must contain the most important key words or phrases, preferably make them the first elements of your title as this holds more weight. Don't use stop words like "the", "and", "to" in your title - the search engines ignore these words because they are so common. They will dilute your title's relevancy.

Your description must contain the relevant keywords

You will most often find keywords separated by commas. You can get more benefit by not using commas in your keywords. For example

web, hosting, web hosting, web site hosting

vs

web hosting web site hosting

The 2nd one is shorter and provides more opportunity to be found. There are more combinations of potential phrases in the 2nd version - you would also get "hosting web site", "site hosting" etc. - it takes some effort but with careful planning you can optimize the placement of the words to achieve many possible combinations that would not be found if you used commas

Your important phrase or keywords must appear at the top of your page, preferably first and within a header tag <h1>important phrase</h1> Then ensure that you have the phrases throughout the document, but especially in the top 1/3 of the page.

Search engines calculate the density of a word in your page. Each search engine is different in this respect, but you can examine the word density in your competitors page and then try to match it. (look in the tools section for resources to help with this analysis)

Your keywords must be relevant to the page, remember you are building a theme on your page for the search engine to find. Your keywords must be in your title, keywords list, description and mixed throughout your page.

Page Design

Avoid the use of frames. Some search engines can navigate frames to varying degrees, but if you can avoid the use of frames it is best to avoid them.

Graphics

Search engines cannot read graphical text, so find a balance. The best page from the search engine perspective is totally text and simple, but these pages might be boring to the web site visitor and make your page bland.

If your links are all graphical then always place text links also at the bottom of the page. Notice this page, there are graphical links at the top but many text links at the bottom of the page.

Make use of the ALT tag for graphics and add in your keywords and phrases into the ALT description. Don't go overboard with this, but all your images should have the ALT tags containing one or two key phrases

Things To Avoid

• Don't stuff your page with keywords and no content. The search engines will penalize you for this and view your page as spam
  
• Don't make any text the same color as the background. This used to be a trick to fill pages with keywords to fool the search engines. It does not work anymore and will likely get your page dropped from the search engines
  
• Do not put redirects or META refresh tags on your page for any reason. They will get your pages banned from the search engines. A common trick used to be to create a page 100% text and highly search engine friendly but of 0% user value, then have a redirect to the real page. This doesn't work anymore - avoid it
  
• Do not put words in your keywords that are not in your content
  
• Do not add in popular words that have no relation to your page

Resources For Page Optimization