Basic SEO: What Search Engines Love - SEO Guide to Creating Websites
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The last two sections of this article will deal with how to create your site in terms of the structure of your pages and the text you put in them. Search engines obtain some information about your site from its directory structure. So it's a good idea to name your files with keywords. Just make sure you don't use too many dashes in your filenames. And be sure to avoid underscores ( _ ) all together. The directory structure itself should be as simple as possible. Create a new directory for each navigation tab and keep all files related to it in that directory. This will keep each page close to the root domain and save you from a complex, multilevel directory tree.
Few things are more important, as far as search engines are concerned, than the TITLE tag. On most search results pages, it is used as the link and main title of the site's listing. And of course, search engines use them to determine what the site is about. Here's how to use the TITLE tag most effectively:
Put the TITLE tags below the <HEAD> tag.
Use 40-60 characters (including spaces) between <TITLE> and </TITLE>.
Put the keyword phrase at the very beginning. You can repeat them once, if you like. Make sure you limit the number of small, very common words (the, a, as, of, etc.).
The DESCRIPTION meta tag is also often shown in the search results page. Its text is often shown below the text from the TITLE tag. It's main function is to describe the page to the search engine. Google doesn't necessarily use the DESCRIPTION in its results page, unless it can't find the keywords on the page, but they, along with other search engines, do index it. You should place the DESCRIPTION tag directly below the TITLE tag, using the same guidelines as for the TITLE tag, but this time you can use up to 250 characters. It should look like this:
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Blah blah blah.”>
You will most likely want to include some images on your site. A helpful way to boost your search engine ranking would be to include the ALT attribute, which means alternative text. Nowadays, ALT text appears when you hold the mouse over an image, or for programs that speak the page to blind people. They are also read by search engines and assuming you don't overload them with keywords, they might help your ranking a little. Place keywords in the image ALT text like this:
<IMG SRC=”name-of-file.jpg” ALT=”This text should be between 40-60 characters”>
You also need body text on each page. It doesn't have to be that much, but it should equal a couple of paragraphs in length. Search engines are very biased toward content, so you should take this opportunity to really define what you site is about using keywords, of course. You may want to avoid embedding text in images, which would be useful for web designers who create all their pages in a graphic design program. However, apparently Google now claims they can index this type of text.
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