PC Doctor+ Guide 11 Search Engines

Search Engine Optimisation: Overview

Before Web pages can be optimized, you must conduct research to determine which keywords to target. This involves finding targeted keywords, determining their popularity, assessing the amount of competition, and then deciding which keywords to use in your Web pages.

Fortunately, there are tools to help you find out what people are really searching for. Visit the keywords section for more information.

Meta Tags

What Meta Tags Are And How You Should Use Them.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are hidden HTML tags used to describe various aspects about a Web page. The two most important meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords tags. Let's take a closer look at each meta tag.

Sample meta tags:

<HEAD> <TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Guide to what meta tags are and how you should use them."> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="meta tags, free meta tag generators."> </HEAD> <BODY>

Meta Description Tags

The contents of meta description tags are indexed by some search engines as the page description in its search engine results.

However, meta description tags is often misused, with misleading or even false descriptions about a page. As a result, the relevancy of search results are often compromised, so search engines have begun to de-emphasize the importance and even totally ignore the contents of the tag.

Some search engines, such as AltaVista and Inktomi, do still index the contents of a meta description tag for its search results. But if the meta description tag is missing, the search engine will usually extract a description from the body text.

In general, search engines will index the first 135-249 characters of the meta description tag contents. Write a description that sells the page.

Include the most important keywords at the beginning of the tag. But, don't just fill the description tag with keywords.

Meta Tag Keywords

The contents of a meta keyword tag is used to help define the important keywords of a page. It sounds good in theory. However, in practice, the meta keywords tag is often misused, including the addition of excessive or irrelevant keywords. So much so, that most, but not all, search engines totally ignore the contents of the meta keywords tag.

Inktomi is the only search engine that I know of that indexes the meta keywords tag. Since Inktomi provides search results for top search engines such as MSN, HotBot, and Overture, I would say it's probably worth the effort to include the meta keywords tag in your Web pages.

If you do decide to use the meta keywords tag, I suggest that you only include the most important keyword phrase in the content of the tag. The meta keywords tag should be placed just after the meta description tag.

Should you separate keywords with commas?

This is a question that has come up a lot and one that I have wondered about myself.

Some search engine optimizers recommend leaving out the commas, so that it creates more keyword combinations for the search engines to index.

I'm actually testing both techniques at the moment to see which, if any, helps improve rankings in search engines that still indexes the tag.

I have yet to see conclusive proof that one technique is better than the other. So I can't recommend one or the other. I suggest you try both techniques to see if which, if any, produces better results.

HTML Tags

Find out what the important HTML tags are in search engine optimisation.

The 3 most important HTML tags in search engine optimisation are title tags, header tags, and ALT text. Let's take a closer look at each HTML tag.

Title Tags

Most of the major search engines give the most relevance to keywords in the title tags within the Web page. As such, every page should have a title tag. In general, I have found that short keyword rich descriptions in title tags work best.

Good title tag:

<TITLE>Search Engine Optimisation</TITLE>

Not so good title tag:

<TITLE>SEO.com - Search engine optimisation tips, tricks, news, resources, tools and much more besides!</TITLE>

Header Tags

Many of the major search engines place a lot of relevance on keywords in header tags (H1, H2 and H3). As such I recommend that you sprinkle keyword rich header tags on your Web pages.

Sample header tags:

<H1>Search Engine Optimisation</H1> <H2>Search Engine Positioning</H2>

ALT Text

Always include ALT text to describe the contents of an image. Use keyword rich descriptions in the ALT text, as some search engines index the keywords.

You will also provide a text description to visitors with slow download connections or have their images turned off. But to ensure that the text is visible, you must set the image's width and height dimensions.

The use of ALT text also enable visually disabled visitors using screen readers, or reviewers, to interpret the image on the screen. Images can be translated, only if there is alternative text describing the image.

Also consider adding a period "." at the end of the ALT text, so that someone hearing the page can tell where one image stops and another starts.

Sample ALT text within an image tag: