Google Optimization Secrets From The Trenches
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What do learning how to outline a research paper and optimizing your website to rank highly in Google have in common? Much more than you might think at first glance. Keep reading to find out how to help your visitors find the information they need and keep Google's spiders coming back for more.
If you have a website, and you want people to find it, then your site must be designed to be search engine friendly. There are some obvious and not so obvious things you can do to achieve this.
There is also a bit of trade off between which search engine you optimize for. While this article will focus on optimizing for Google, many of the things we talk about will also apply to Yahoo.
Additionally, before I go into the meat of the article itself, Google relies first and foremost on its “PageRank,” and other factors for determining your position in Google’s results are secondary. With that said, this article is not going to go into methods for increasing your PageRank. Instead we are going to focus on the other factors that go into how Google calculates relevance for a given keyword. For some great information on page rank, check out this article: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-
PageRank-Frequently-Asked-Questions/
Google looks at a lot of factors to determine a page’s relevance to a keyword. In fact, while their primary reliance on PageRank rankles me, I do like the way they look at a whole page, and the way everything fits together within that page.
To that end, there are things you can do to “help” your page look very focused to the keywords that are important to you.
Keying in to the Top
Most website owners know to put in the meta tags for keywords and to make the description meta tag keyword-focused. But then they will simply make the Title tag their Site name, which is a big mistake. The title tag should first have the single keyword (or at most three) that your site really wants, and then it should have the site name. For an example of this, see this article: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-
Engine-Optimization-Help/Search-Engines-How-to-make-them-a-TAG-
they-will-love/
Further, the very first graphic for your site should have the alternate text set to the keywords you focus on.
Next, while CSS has taken the venerable H1, H2, H3, and so on tags and replaced them with div and span headings, this reduces your potential ranking within Google.
You see, Google (and Yahoo) looks for the h1 and h2 tags as important indicators for what the text will contain. Therefore, the top of your document should have an H1 tag that has your most important keywords, followed by some content that is relevant to a visitor. Additionally, Google has become rather savvy to the frequency a site is updated with new content, so you’ll want to continually add new “stuff” to your site, again using the H1 tag, so that Google will come back to your site and respider. The more frequently Google thinks it has to come back to respider your site, the higher your site will rank.
Next: Going Higher, uhh, Heir … archical that is >>
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