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1.
Use text throughout your website.
Some
people are tempted to make their entire website a large graphic
(or at least to rely heavily on graphics). The search engines
reward the use of actual text.
2.
Choose your page titles wisely.
Title
refers to the text between the <title></title> tags.
The title of each individual page should strongly
reflect the specific content that will be placed on that page. You
should not use the same title for each page. This
mistake is second only to the mistake of not giving
your pages a title at
all. Additionally, the title should contain
the keywords that you’d
like for people to find when searching in a
search engine such as Google. However, the
title should
look and sound
natural.
3.
Choose your text wisely.
First
off, the text in the body of your web page
should
be related to the title that you choose
in step 1, and if possible,
should also directly reuse the
keywords in your title.
You should also introduce any other keywords
that you’d
like to rank well on in the search engines. It would
probably be wise to make a list of targeted
keywords and phrases. When appropriate, bold
and/or italicize important keywords or phrases.
Having several instances of your keywords
on a page
is helpful,
but
your
text
should
always sound natural. Never make your text sound
awkward for the
sake
of concentrating
keywords. However, it will help to keep your
keywords in mind as you develop your content.
It
is very hard to compete for rankings on the level
of individual
keywords unless a keyword is rare. For
that reason, it is normally a better idea to
focus on doing well for three and four word phrases. If you
are developing
a web
page to sell DVDs of dog shows, it would be
very difficult
to place well for the single keyword “DVD” but
it may be much easier to move high in the rankings
if you focus on the
phrase “Dog
Show DVDs.” The longer the key phrase,
the more unique your website is and the less
competition
it has
in the rankings
for
particular searches.
5.
Be Specific not General.
This
is related to suggestion 4. The more specific you are in
developing the keywords and phrases for
your web pages, the less competition you’ll
have to deal with in the rankings. Think about
the difference between a search for “real
estate” and
a search for “morrisville
pa real estate.” On Google, the first
search brings approximately 36,000,000 results.
The second
search brings
only 35,000 results.
Think about it: do you really want to compete
with every company that does real estate?
By being specific
you
can exponentially
eliminate the number of other web pages that
you are competing with and focus on your
target audience.
Note: An
implicit rule in all of these steps is that you should divide your
website content into many pages. Do not stuff all of your content
onto only a few pages. Make sure that the search engines know exactly
what each page is about.
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