 Search
Engine Placement Tips
by Robyn Harton
No one will see your trust-inspiring, memorable graphics
and information rich content if no one gets to your site in
the first place. You want your site to rank high in the search
engines. There is no magic involved in getting highly placed
in search engines. Optimizing your site for search engine
placement requires effort and regular updating. Here are some
tips on good search engine ranking.
HTML Tags
Proper use of these HTML tags can significantly help your
ranking in various search engines.
<meta name="description"
content="_________">
Normally read by machines only. 1 or 2 sentences about the
page. Use keywords as much as possible. First 150 characters
should contain the most important information.
<TITLE></TITLE>
Read by machines and people visiting the site. Brief descriptive
title. Use keywords as much as possible. Up to 60 characters
recommended.
<meta name="keywords" content="_________">
Normally read by machines (spider robots) only. Use only key
words/phrases that actually match your site's content. Use
all lower case. Use plurals (e.g., dogs instead of dog). Do
not repeat any word more than 3 times. One stragegy is to
use as few keywords as possible; 10 or fewer are preferred
so that each word has more importance in the search engine's
ranking. Another is to use as many keywords as possible. Each
stragegy has its supporters as well as its own ups and downs.
| max
characters allowed* |
AltaVista |
Excite
|
Infoseek |
Inktomi |
Lycos |
WebCrawler |
| description
meta tag |
150 |
395 |
170 |
249 |
N/A |
395 |
| title
tag |
78 |
70 |
75 |
115 |
60 |
60 |
| keywords
meta tag |
? |
N/A |
1000 |
? |
N/A |
N/A |
| *a
character is a letter, number, space or punctuation mark
|
Page Body Text
What you put in the body of your page, the part that people
read, is just as important to the search engines as it is
to the viewers. Search engines will place pages full of keyword-rich
content higher than pages with text that apppears to the search
engine to be irrelevant.
<BODY></BODY>
Read by machines and site visitors. Use every keyword at least
once somewhere in the body text. Make first 250 words heavy
in keywords and readable as a good site description. Put image
alt tags to work by using keywords to describe the images.
Use upper case letters only for proper names. Instead of upper
case, use bold or italics to emphasize other words in body
text.
Links
The number of sites that have linked to yours directly affects
your site's ranking on some search engines, particularly AltaVista,
Infoseek, Excite, Inktomi and WebCrawler. Consider offering
a reciprocal link program to get more sites to link to yours.
===================================
by Robyn Harton, Owner
of Robyn A Harton Creative
Articles & Tips on Making Graphics
and Web Design Work for You
Copyright ©2002 Robyn
A Harton Creative All Rights Reserved
http://rahcreative.com and http://robynaharton.com
You may reprint this article on your website, email, or print
publication with no additional
permission required as long as
this entire copyright statement and links are included.
>> Have a copy sent
to directly to you, just email seplacementtips@rahcreative.com.
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updated 6/25/02
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