ways to make your pages search engine friendly

There are a few Web site design guidelines that every budding Web site designer should keep in mind in order to attract more traffic to their site, because there’s nothing like a poorly designed site to instantly lose traffic and alienate potential visitors. While there are some exceptions to this rule, for the most part this holds true for the majority of Web sites out there.

You can have the best written content and the most targeted keywords on the Net, but if your website is visually jarring or completely confusing navigation-wise, you might be missing out on some potential traffic.

Optimizing your pages for the search engines is absolutely essential if you want them to appear in the top 10 – 30 positions of results. High-ranking pages are even more critical if you’ll be starting your affiliate business with a very small or non-existent promotional budget and won’t be using pay-per-clicks and other forms of advertising.

Here is a list of tips to help you get your pages to rank high in the search engine results.

KEYWORD-RICH PAGES. In the past you had to be extremely careful not to overuse your keyword phrases for fear that the search engines would consider you an engine spammer and penalize you. Six per page was the maximum number of repetitions suggested.

KEYWORD-RICH PAGE NAMES. Name your pages using keywords relevant to the product sold on that page, or the most relevant content. For example, if my page were about Proform Treadmills, I would call the page exactly that ‘proform-treadmills.html’.

SITE MAP. Offer your visitors a site map with links that point to all the important pages and sections of your site. If your site consists of one hundred or more pages, you may wish to break the site map up into separate pages.

RELEVANT CONTENT. Jill Whalen, a well-known search engine (SE) expert advises that you should work with at least 250 words on a page for search engine optimization purposes. More or less words will also work, but she makes the point that you need at least 250 words so that you can repeat your keyword phrases a number of times throughout the page without seeming ‘dopey’.

ELIMINATE CLUTTER. Search engines don’t read graphics or javascript, and they get confused when they encounter nested tables. If all that stuff precedes the first most important keyword phrases on your page, your ranking may be lowered as the SE considers that phrase less relevant, due to its low placement on the page.

META TAGS. The 2 Meta Tags that you need to be most concerned about are the Title and Description tags.

Title Tags - The title tag is perhaps one of the most crucial factors in how a search engine will rank your site. The text you use in the title tag must include your most relevant keyword phrases. It must also make sense, as the title tag text is the wording that appears in the reverse bar of your browser. That’s the blue bar right across the top of your browser window. It is also what the text  that most of the search engines will display as the title for your listing.

Description Tag - Some search engines will use the text contained in your meta description tag as your listing description. The meta description tag also influences your site’s ranking in the engines, so you should repeat your primary keyword phrase once or twice in the description.

Note about Keyword Tags - I remember a time when we all ’stuffed’ our keyword meta tags with every keyword relevant to our sites – and then added some more. Nowadays only Inktomi, and perhaps Teoma, apparently index sites using the keyword meta tag. Most search engine experts advise that the keyword meta tag is no longer worth your time or trouble. I don’t think that adding a couple of keywords to a meta tag is any trouble at all, so I continue to add them to my pages.

ALT Tags - The ALT tag, which stands for ‘alternative text’, is primarily for use when the image is not being displayed. They were intended to make your site more accessible to visually impaired folks using text readers. Furthermore, as search engines don’t index images, any text on your site that is presented in image format won’t get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, always fill in your ALT tags filled with keywords. This boosts your keyword frequency and will help your site get a better ranking.

DYNAMIC PAGES.  Dynamic pages, which deliver content based on user input or other variables, can be more useful and responsive to visitor needs than regular static HTML pages. However, if while indexing a search engine encounters a dynamically generated page, as distinguished by a question mark (?) in the URL, the SE stops indexing the site at that point. Here are a few tips to get your dynamic pages indexed.

AVOID TRICKS AND DECEPTION. Google makes similar site quality recommendations to those below to help you avoid having your site removed from their index.

Don’t deceive your users by presenting different content to search engines than isdisplayed on your pages. A common trick in the past was to include highly popular but irrelevant keywords in meta tags to get ‘the click’. While that brought traffic to the site, the visitor was disappointed by results that had nothing to do with their search, and the engines appeared not to be able to produce relevant results. The search engines now pay attention to such tactics and will remove those using deceptive practices from their index.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

This includes using hidden text or links, sneaky redirects; pages loaded with irrelevant keywords and the use of ‘doorway’ pages. Google also recommends against creating subdomains and domains with essentially duplicate content.This includes using hidden text or links, sneaky redirects; pages loaded with irrelevant keywords and the use of ‘doorway’ pages. Google also recommends against creating subdomains and domains with essentially duplicate content.

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