1. Search Engine Myths and Facts:
Myth #1: The more sites link to my site, the more popular my site must be, the higher the Search Engines will rank my page on the keywords that apply to my site.
Fact #1: In order for a reverse link to have a positive effect, the keywords found on both web sites must match. Errant and non-matching links WILL HURT YOUR SITE. Rule: only link to sites that do the same you do and have quality content. Avoid "Link Farms" at all costs, they will get you blacklisted.
Myth #2: Keywords that apply to my site are entered in the meta keyword tag and duplicated a number of times in the page text (body text).
Fact #2: Most major search engines no longer consider the keyword tag at all. Put your keywords in the ALT tag of images and NAME tags of hyperlinks. Keywords towards the top of the page and at the beginning of a sentence carry the most weight. Proximity is very important.
Myth #3: By placing a link to another, similar site, I am losing traffic to a competitor.
Fact #3: Unless your site is called GOOGLE, YAHOO or AOL, the benefit achieved in the Search Engines and its resulting traffic far outweighs the occasional click away from your site. Place outgoing links to the bottom of your page to minimize the loss.
2. Selecting your Keywords and Keyword Phrases:
The selection of keywords and keyword phrases WILL make or break your site.
Rarely will a professional writer or webmaster come up with the right terms by which surfers expect to find your site. Optimizing and indexing a page or site for the wrong keywords and terms will give you the same results as not doing it at all.
Question your peers, friends, family or kids as to what search terms THEY would use in trying to find a site that offers similar content to your site. Accumulate 3-5 keywords and phrases that best describe your site, then head for http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ a tool that will tell you how many people searched for a particular term last month. Understand that the
searches shown represents about 10% of all search engine traffic.
Realize that the higher that search number, the more competitive the top ranks become. For instance, you have little or no chance to break the top 100 on any search engine for the keywords "cooking" or "garlic." However, keyword phrases such as "cooking with garlic", "garlic cooking tips", "healthy cooking with garlic" or "garlic cooking dictionary" will increase your chances for a top ranking dramatically.
As an added benefit to concise terms, the surfers arriving at your site have been pre qualified and will find exactly what they were looking for.
3. Crafting your Page Header:
While text entered in this section of your page does not appear on the web page that surfers read, the implications on ranking your pages are serious. If you are not familiar with building the HTML code for your header, simply search any search engine for the terms: "Meta Tag Generator" and copy / paste the code.
a. The Page Title Meta Tag:
Without a doubt, the page title is given extremely high consideration in ranking your page. So leaving your title to state "New Page 1" is not helping you at all. The title of your web page (the text placed between the <title> tags in your HTML code) should be concise and a maximum of 40 characters. Whenever possible, try to duplicate your main keywords. As an example, the page optimized for "garlic cooking tips" could have a title like this
"Cooking and Garlic: Garlic Cooking Tips"
b. The Page Description Meta Tag:
Some engines weigh this equally has heavy as the title tag and display the text to their surfers along with your title. It must make sense to the surfer and it also must contain all of your keyword phrases. For instance the "garlic cooking tips" page could read like this: "Garlic cooking tips for the novice cook and the experienced chef. Alphabetical index of our Garlic Cooking Tips". A maximum of 150 characters is suggested for this tag.
c. The Page Keyword Meta Tag:
Rampant abuse of this tag by "keyword stuffing" made this an unreliable indicator for the search engines. Nevertheless, do not omit it. Some engines still will add weight to the keywords for as long as those keywords are also present in your title, description and body text. In the above example, you would enter: "garlic cooking tips, garlic cooking tip, cooking, garlic, tip, tips." Note that no keyword should be repeated more than 3 times or you will be
penalized for keyword spamming.
4. Wording your Body Text:
It is essential for your body text to include informative quality content. Here are some rules:
a. Always write content relevant to your meta title and description.
b. Write keyword-optimized pages with proper paragraph breaks that contain 250 to 300 words.
c. Your keyword phrase should be entered as a header tag on the top of the page.
d. Your keyword phrase should be near the beginning of every paragraph that follows.
e. Your keyword density should be between 4-8%. In a 300-word page, your keywords should be repeated between 12 to 24 times.
f. Have Images? Important: Enter your Keywords in the Image Alternative Display Tags.
5. Naming your Site and Pages:
A proper domain name for our example site would be cooking-garlic.com, garlic-cooking.com or any variations of that theme. Instead of naming the page itself as new-page-1.htm, further propagate your keywords and name the page garlic-cooking-tips.htm
Note the use of hyphens which by most search engines are replaced with spaces, thus separating each key word. Underscore characters will do the same. Bunching of words as in garliccookingtips.com is a risky business in that your keywords may not be separated.
As you can see in search engine results, the top results will always contain domains that include a keyword or keyword phrase. To help people find you, it is ideal to own both domains, garlic-cooking.com and garliccooking.com, with the un-hyphenated domain being automatically re-directed to your hyphenated one. No matter how people remember your site, they will get there.
6. Building Link Popularity:
As the final test of your site’s relevancy, search engines analyze how many other garlic and cooking sites link to your site. It doesn’t stop there. Search engines analyze the link name, link title, link URL and the text near your link. The perfect link to your site coming from a garlic or cooking site would look something like this:
http://garlic-cooking.com/garlic-cooking-tips.htm – Lot’s of garlic tips here.
How similar web sites title and describe your site is paramount to the value of the link. Links from non-garlic or non-cooking sites are not only discarded but may be harmful to you. This is why you must stay away from "general link farms" at all costs.
7. Optimize your Culinary Directory Listing:
ONE OF THE STRONGEST LINKS you can have is the one right here at Chef2Chef. Simply place your site in the proper category of our directory and include your keywords and phrases in the Title and Description of your site. Our directory is indexed weekly by all major search engines. Go to: Link Exchange or Paid Inclusion
8. Closing Notes:
Each page on your site can be optimized for the specific content for as long as the theme throughout your site remains the same. In the above example, the theme of "cooking" and "garlic" would be carried into all the detail pages. A few pointers here:
a. Your home page or index page should be a "site-map" that contains links to all of your optimized pages.
b. All optimized detail pages must link back to your home page or index page.
c. Optimized detail pages should point to other optimized detail pages. If you have hundreds of them, include the 10 most relevant.
d. Do NOT use automated submission software for the major search engines. Manually submit your home page monthly to the major search engines.
While this document only contains the tip of the iceberg to search engine indexing, adherence to the basic rules lined out will get you well on the way to the top of the search engine rankings.
The Team at
Chef2Chef.Net
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