Getting the Most Out of Your Website
Its impossible to say exactly how these minor changes will give you better search engine placement for your website but they do have some impact. Combine the lot and you could see a big improvement in your traffic.
Your Domain Name
If you haven’t already brought your domain name, get one that includes your keywords because search engines favor those sites that do. If you plan to use Google Adwords then remember your domain name is visible in the adverts so ‘BuyApplesHere.com’ will be a better domain name than ‘HandcocksApples.com’.
Title Element
The Title element is part of your site’s HTML and tells the web browser what to show as the window’s or tab’s title. It also appears in the search engine results. Use your keywords in the title to help the search engines but make sure the title makes sense to the human visitors to your site. As well as a title for the website as a whole, you may want to make the Title element reflect the content of each page. This is especially useful if you have a blog. When you write an article called “101 Uses for Granny Smith’s Apples” to target the keywords “Granny Smith’s Apples” you want the “101 Uses for Granny Smith’s Apples” to show up in the search engine, not your websites title.
Meta Tags
Hidden in the top of your web pages are the Keyword and Description meta tags. The Description tag should give a one sentence summary of your website that includes your keywords. Like the Title Element it can get displayed when your site is listed by the search engine so make sure it appeals to human readers. The Keyword tag was so abused by spammers that it has become totally discredited. The general consensus is that it has no effect on your search engine placement but personally I always use it because it costs nothing and just might help.
Categories, Sections and Tagging
Every piece of text on your website can impact on your placement in the search engines. Many sites, especially blogs, file individual posts under different categories or use tagging to group related articles. Think about how you can use the names of these categories to hit keywords. If your site is about apples and has a selection of recipes, consider the advantages of using having two sections called Cake Recipes and Pie Recipes rather than one big section just called Recipes. This has two benefits. The first is obvious, you can tune your text to target a range of different keywords. The second is less obvious. If your domain name is BuyApplesHere.com, with a category of Cake Recipes and an article called Apple Cake Recipes your URL can be ‘BuyApplesHere.com/Cake-Recipes/Apple-Cake-Recipe.html’. To both humans and search engines this will look good to anyone searching on ‘Apple Cake Recipe’.
Don’t Over Do It
Using your keyword at every opportunity will have negative effects. Firstly the search engines are more likely to treat you as spam. Secondly, it is very hard to use keywords regularly without it seeming forced or ungrammatical to the human reader. Your website can be the optimized perfectly for the search engines but unreadable by humans and it is the humans that spend money. There is no magical formula for the optimum number of times to use your keyword per page (a measure know as keyword density) so use your common sense. Your keyword should appear regularly but not at the expense of readability.