Search Engine Considerations

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Search Engine Considerations

Search Engine Return Page (SERP)

Most new visitors to your website will find your through a search engine so the importance of search engine results to the success of your website can never be overstated. Your website designer will take care of the technical stuff behind your search engine optimization (SEO). This page will help understand the process and why your developer asks some of the questions you'll hear.

A picture is worth a thousand words to your website visitors, but search engines look at text. Specifically search engines look at your text and break it down into keywords. Keywords are comprised of names, places, things and phrases (combinations of keywords). You will need to analyze your website and your target audience to determine the those important keywords to bring people to your website.

The success of your keywords is determined by how they are used on your web pages and the amount of competition there is for the specific keyword.. An example of a keyword search is the phrase "Texas Archeology". Changing the search term to "Archeology" gives a completely different result because of the competition for the keyword.

To better understand keywords and their placement, consider the anatomy of a web page. The page is made up of a heading area and the body. The areas are identified to a web browser by HTML commands called Tags.

<html> – tells the browser that HTML code is beginning.

<head> – identifies the beginning of the heading area to the web browser. The heading contains tags that aren't displayed on the web page itself. The information is used by the visitors web-browser and search engines.

</head> – tells the web browser that the heading area is closed. All heading information is complete.

<body> – Tells the web browser the body of the webpage begins. The body contains the text and images for your website. The keywords for your site should be distributed in your body text as frequently but as naturally as possible. If you want your site to show up in the search engine results, then it must be included in the title, description and body of your web page. IF you have a multi-subject website, then you'll probably want to optimize the different pages or sections of your website for those terms.

</body> – Tells the web browser that all the displayed code for your webpage is complete.

</html> – Tells the web browser that all the HTML code for your webpage is complete.

Tags inside the body area of your webpage:

<title>Search Engine Results | Website Design Ideas | FM Net Design</title>

The title tag for the title of your page which is displayed across the browser bar on top of your screen. The title tag should contain keywords that you want to emphasize for your webpage. The title tag is the most important tag on your website.

The description meta tag contains a description of the website but can be tailored for each page. This will be the second most important tag on your website or webpage. The description should contain keywords for the page as search engines index keywords in the description as well as the body of your site.

The keyword meta tag identifies keywords you'd like to emphasize on your site or page. The search engines don't use the keyword tag as they once did but it doesn't hurt to have it there!

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">

This tag is an instruction to the search engine to follow all links on your website or page and index them. This tag may be used in place of the robots.txt file if you don't have any pages you wish to exclude from the search engine index.

Links

All About Description Tags From highrankings.com, all about the description meta tag and it's effect on search engines.

All About the Keyword Tag From highrankings.com, information about the keywords tag and how it's fallen from favor with search engines.

All About Title Tags From highrankings.com, all about title tags and their importance to search engines.

Keyword Research Nichbot Keyword Research that gives you access to over 295 billion keywords in 41 languages spanning 243 countries using multiple keyword sources like Google, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Smart Marketers no longer fish from just one lake of keywords. In fact, you gain an immediate edge over the competition when you...

Lynx Text Viewer See your website online like the search engines see it at Delorie.com. You'll need to have a blank webpage in the root directory of your website to view the site.

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