Part 3: Optimizing your webpages for the search engines

One final piece of information, do not use more words than you have two. Though I cannot prove it, I believe too many words in the Title tage will dilute its "power".

I usually write a phrase, no more than 6 words or so for a three word keyword phrase.

Meta tags

Meta tags - both description and keywords - have less importance today. Most search engines completely disregard them. Some smaller search engines and directories do however still use the desciption tag for the descriptive text in the results pages. Not for the "clickable" text but for the text underneath it.

Another good reason to include Meta tags is that in search engine marketing every little helps and it takes little effort to include them in your page.

I usually list my keyword in both singular and plural form in the Meta keywords. For the Meta description I write a variation of my Title tag. I try to make it short and snappy without sounding "spammy".

Alt tags

The Alt tag is a text tag that is meant to describe the images on your pages. If the image does not load, the text is displayed in place of the image. And some people do surf and search in search engines using the "images off filter".

Same here as with the Meta tags. Alt tags play less of a role in the ranking of your page today than before. But as we said earlier, every little helps and it is easy enough to include a phrase with your keyword for each of your images.

Heading

The Heading tags are still important in search engine promotion. Same as with the Title tag. Try using your keyword phrase while making the Heading interesting without using too many words. Remember the dilution factor we mentioned for the Title tag. Same thing applies here.

Another point to keep in mind. There are several Heading tags - H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. Use them in order. Be logical in your use of headings. Remember that we are trying to help the search engines to make sense of our web pages. It does for example not make sense to put your H1 tag at the bottom of your page.

I only ever use one H1 tag. I use H2 tags - more than one if needed - to emphasize subheadings. I sometimes use h3 tags if I need to breakdown features and factors but ususally I only use H1 and H2 tags.

Page name

Use your keywords to name your pages. If you have chosen "search engine ranking" name your page "search-engine-ranking.html".

If you use the "-" you will help the search engine to read all three words. If you on the other hand name your page "searchengineranking.html" the search engines will only see the first word "search".

In other words use "-" in your page names.

Do not use "_" (underscore) in your page names. Why not? Again, this is nothing I can prove but if you do a search for "_" (underscore), Google will return results. This tells me that Google "reads" the "_" (underscore) character. If you on the other hand search for "-", you get nothing. The "-" character is ignored. Keeping dilution in mind I prefer the separator in my page names to be ignored.

Keyword Density

Keyword density describes the numer of times your keyword appears on your page in relation to the total number of words oin your page. Experts claim taht you should aim for 3-5% or even 1o-15%. I feel keyword density gets to much attention. And here is why?

You should write your pages for people, not search engines. Sure, we should help the search engines understand the topic of your page but in my experience that comes naturally. and nobody knows whether it is 3-5% or 10-15%? And that is quite a big difference!

My advice is to sprinkle yourt keywords throughout the web page. Once in the Title, once in the Metas, once in the Headings and once or twice in each paragraph. In my experience that will do it.

Have fun optimizing your pages and remember that a little goes a long way. Do not wreck your pages trying to reach a keyword density benchmark set by an "expert". You want search engines AND people to like your web pages. And people like GOOD pages. And that is important as we will see in Part 4 of this tutorial.