1. Choosing your Keywords
- A research done by Entireweb 31% of people enter 2 word phrases into search engines, 25% of all users look for 3 word combinations and only about 19% of them try their luck with only a single word.
- Do not choose a keyword to optimize your website for that you don't have the slightest chance of ranking good with because of the fierce competition.
- Do not choose a keyword that nobody looks for.
- Do not choose a keyword that does not relate strongly enough to your content.
- Only use generally popular keywords if you do not need targeted traffic.
- Do not use words that may get your site filtered or banned from search engines.
- Do not use images with filenames or ALT tags ( Alt attributes of IMG tag ) that may get your site filtered or banned from search engines.
- Only use dynamic pages when the functionality demands it.
- Use lots of relevant content, well laid out into separate pages.
- For best results optimize one page for one keyword.
- Do not post half-finished sites.
2. HTML Content
Title Tags
- The title should bot be any longer than 60 characters. ( scrubtheweb.com )
- The title should not begin with the domain name. It is often considered as spam.
- The domain name shouldn't be repeated in the title. It is often considered as spam.
- Do not use the same filename as the title tag, or the same filename as the domain name. It is often considered as spam.
Meta Description Tags
- Shouldn't be any longer than 25-30 words ( DMOZ ).
- Shouldn't be any longer than 100 characters ( Google ).
- Shouldn't be any longer than 150 characters ( scrubtheweb.com ).
- Shouldn't be any longer than 200 characters ( searchenginewatch.com referring to Google ).
Meta Keyword Tags
- Shouldn't be any longer than 268 characters ( AltaVista ).
- Shouldn't be any longer than 378 characters ( searchenginewatch.com referring to Google ).
- You should not use words that are not present in the body of the page.
- Redundant characters will not hurt overall results, however words after the first 300 characters rarely do any good.
- Start all keywords with capital letters. ( Relevant only on alphabetical listings )
- Separate keywords with the ", " ( comma, space ) character combination. ( Most search engines use either character as the separator ).
- You may use phrases as well.
- You should not use any word, not even within phrases more than 3 times. It is often considered as spam.
3. Content
- The text on the page should contain the keywords right at the beginning of the page.
- Do not overuse keywords. Neither keyword should take up more than 12-24% of the entire body text. It is often considered as spam.
- Do not use too much content right on the front page. Both loading time and redundancy of additional words used will reduce the chance of showing up in relevant searches
4. HTML Code Page
- In case your website uses a language different than the default of the search engine which your target audience prefers, or your website uses special characters unique to that language, make sure to implement the proper HTML codepage tag.
- Unicode versions of special characters ( HTML encoded characters ) are more or less impossible to look up in most search engines.
5. Search Engine Basics
- Search engines operate by funds as well. Funds are collected either from selling advertisement placement, selling listings, or both. When a search engine company sells out the area above the search results as advertisement space, and displays only relevant results based on what the users were looking for, most people will be mislead by the placement of such links, and choose them instead of the actual results.
- Search engines that operate by funds generated by selling listings will not show your website within the results regardless of its relevance, unless you sign up for their service.
- You may be listed for free even on fee based search engines by getting your site listed on either of the directories the search engine company buys information from. However, such directories such as Yahoo.com and DMOZ.org are moderated based on relevance and content, thus getting listed on their websites may take some time and efforts.
- Most search engines rank your website by relevance, which is measured by the thresold of keywords.
- Some search engines, such as Google.com as well, will sort even relevant sites by their popularity, measuring the page rank by the actual links leading to the site. Also, the text or ALT TAG text accompanied with these links will influence the keywords the website is shown in the listings for.
- Some search engines will consider a website more and more popular when they are clicked on the results page. These inlude AltaVista.com.
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