Optimizing your website

Have you ever wondered how do some websites manage to appear in top positions in the search results? A big role is played by on-site optimizing techniques. This means to design and structure your website so that it is search-engine friendly. So how can this be done?

Optimizing the HTML tags

The first thing that you should consider doing is inserting meta tags. These tags appear inside the head tag and are used to describe the document. Although major search engines like Google ignore them because they are the easiest way to trick crawlers by giving false information, they are still used by other, smaller search engines (like MSN). Let's have a look over an example to illustrate this:

As you can see, the meta tags appear between the <head> and </head>. There are also other meta tags available but they do not have a great influence over the crawlers.

Next, it's the title tag. The title tag describes the text that will appear in the browser's title bar. But it is also very important for search engines. They value all the keywords found in the title. That is why you should have your top key words or phrases in here. Don't use your URL because it's pointless. The address bar is designed for that. Also, try to keep your title at a decent size. Having a very long title could be considered as spam.

<title>SEO directories - a free list of website directories</title>

You can also put additional descriptive attributes to some tags. Such is the case of the img tag. Besides getting your code tidy and valid according to W3C standards, you are able to insert a keyword in your document at the same time.

Website navigation

In other words, the menu used by a visitor to browse your website. This will also be used by crawlers who spider all your pages. This is why it is important to design the navigation so that it is viewable by both humans and robots. So don't use java scripts instead of anchor tags or, worse, flash menus which cannot be read by crawlers. Text links are the best way to connect pages.

If, for some reason, you cannot switch your flash menu with classic text links, then put those somewhere at the bottom of the page so that crawlers have a chance to spider the website.

The content

If you want a good position in the SERPs then "Content is King". Your website needs to have good and original content that is useful to visitors.

Including keywords

So where should you put your keywords? Apart from the title and the meta tags described above, your keywords should also be present as plain text on your page. Try to structure your text in paragraphs and have a certain heading for each of them. Words found in headings are valued more by crawlers.

<h1>First heading</h1> <p>Content for first paragraph.</p> <h1>Second heading</h1> <p>Content for second paragraph.</p>