It’s been almost a year and a half since we wrote an actual marketing tip about search engine optimization, but due to the overwhelming amount of questions on the subject to our “@ Your Service” section, we thought we’d bring you an update for 2001.

Search engine optimization basically consists of making small, yet highly important changes to your web site, and since up to 85% of Internet users depend on search engines as their primary method of finding new sites (according SearchEngines.com), optimizing your site can’t be overlooked.

Determing Your Most Popular Keywords

Before doing anything to optimize your web site for search engine rankings, the first thing you are going to want to do is find out which keywords relevant to your site are being searched the most.

One of our favorite tools for doing so is WordTracker. Simply input the keywords that you think your target audience will be searching for to find your site and WordTracker will tell you how popular those search terms are and recommend other related terms.

For more information, check out WordTracker.

Title & Meta Tags

Yes, these are important! We look to these tags as the first major area requiring overhauling. These Title and META tags need to be located in the section of your web site’s HTML programming. Your title tag should include your top four or five most important keyword search terms.

The most important META tags for search engine optimization are the “Keyword” and “Description” tags. Your META Keyword tag should list your top keyword search terms first and then a couple more relevant terms that people may use to find a site similar to your’s. As a rule of thumb, it is best to only use a maximum of ten search terms in your META Keyword tag and NEVER include terms that are not found within the text of your site (this can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings).

Over the past year the META Keyword tag has become less important in search engine optimization and most search engines pay closer attention to the META Description tag. The content found in this tag is used by most search engines to summarize what your site offers in their search listings. Be sure to also repeat your top four to five keywords in this tag.

Here’s an example of the text used for optimized Title and META Tags for a fictional web site, Mondo Pizza:

Title Tag Text: Mondo Pizza - Italian food, pasta and free delivery.

Keyword META Tag Text: “Mondo pizza pie Baltimore free delivery brick oven Italian food pasta”

Description META Tag Text: “Mondo Pizza has the finest selection of fine Italian food, pasta and brick oven pizza in Baltimore. We have free delivery, eat-in or carry out.

Body Text & Internal Pages

The actual HTML text that is on your page is the #1 most important feature when optimizing your web site. Each keyword that you choose should be used at least twice in the first 200 words of your home page.

It is a good rule to also hyperlink half of these keywords to internal pages within your web site — search engines tend to give extra emphasis to linked keywords. It helps to also include the keyword in the page url your link is directing the user to. For example, if “Italian food” is linked from the Mondo Pizza home page, it should go to an internal page about Italian food, and that page’s URL should be www.mondopizza.com/italianfood.html.

You will also want to repeat the title, META tags, and keywords in your internal site pages. Some web masters tend to overlook internal pages when optimizing for search engines.

Alt Tags & Images

Here’s an important tip: search engines CANNOT read images. When a search engine’s robot or spider look over your site for indexing, they see nothing when they come to an image (even if the image is just a word!). In search engine optimization terms, images are wasted space.

The way to work compensate for this obstacle is to add ALT tags to all of your images. Alt tags are the words or lines of text that appear when you move your mouse over a graphic (photos, clip art, etc.).

Weaving critical keywords into these alt tag descriptions can help improve your chances for a better search ranking. Search engine spiders can scan the text of the alt tag code, adding it to the ensemble of your other optimized site features.

 

• For more information about search engine optimization, be sure to check out our Internet Marketing Resources Directory’s SEO category for some of the best resources on the ‘Net.

   

Stay tuned for next week’s Part II tip in which we’ll be reviewing optimization for Static vs. Dynamic sites, Link Popularity, the differences between search engines and directories, and paid-for submittals.

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