Search Engine Elements
Overview
Ranking well with the major search engines is tricky enough, but if you do not include the 'basics' of good search engine optimization in your web pages now, you'll probably find yourself spending a good deal of time and maybe even money in your marketing efforts in the months and years to come.
Each web page includes 9 (or more) SEO ( search engine optimized ) page elements and components.
- <title> meta tag
- Page Title ( <H1> )
- Page Description ( <H2> )
- Static icons
- Search Form
- Dropmenu
- Content Heading ( <H3> )
- Copyright
- Bottomlinks
If you were to hire a reputable search engine marketing firm and request they build your website to meet the needs of today's search engine requirements you would find the majority of these elements and components being used. When I say a 'reputable search engine marketing firm' this would mean a company that understands how search engines work, what they look for in a website and in the web pages, both internally and externally.
In this exercise we'll focus on items 1, 2 and 3.
You can learn more about SEO at www.searchenginenews.com ( sign up, it's worth the $69 ).
INSTRUCTIONS
Meta tags
To edit the 'meta tags' open your page, switch to code view and edit the text enclosed within the:
<title>Page Title</title>
<meta name="Keywords" content="place your keywords here"
/>
<meta name="Description" content="place a description for
your webpage here" />
Page Title (SEO H1 tag) / Page Description (SEO H2 tag)
The 'trick' to getting the best bang for the buck, or search engine results listing, is to match the meta <title> tag, with the Page title ( not identical, but use a few of the same key words or key phrases ).
The Page Title is regular text, styled via the fonts.css style sheet. The reason we include these 2 elements, or make mention of them in the instructions, is there relevance to your web page and it's ability to place 'well' within the search engine results. I could go on for pages regarding search engines, and page ranking, instead I'll provide the highlights.
The Page Title should be used to 'describe' the information on a specific page. If you go to www.google.com, and type in a search term the 'results' will be listed. In the following example:
type: football expression web templates
The first result ( at the time of writting these instructions )
Product Details for Ambition Red Football | Football Expression ...
| Ambition Red Football. Price:
$79.99. Product Type: Expression Web Template Released:
2007-05-16 Available Packages: FrontPage Template ... www.i3dthemes.com/ |
the first line {
Product Details for Ambition Red Football | Football Expression ...
} is taken from the web pages <title> tagthe second line { Ambition Red Football. } is pulled directly from the content area of the web page, along with the rest of the info...
Google tends to display the <title> meta tag as the first line of the results, and the second line is pulled from the content on the page. If the title tag, and the first bits of content contain information or text relevant to each other, your page will most likely score a higher relevance and positioning for those search terms.
As a bonus, in the coding of your web page, both the 'Page Title' and the 'Page Description' are are listed at the 'VERY TOP' of the page, there are the first and second lines of code, listed under the opening <body> tag...so these are the first things a search engine sees in terms of content, therefore scores this information as 'more important' or 'relevant' to a search query using the same 'keywords' or 'keyphrases'.
