DIY SEO - Part 2 Tags n Things

Part 2 Tips 4 tags

Meta tags are the descriptive tags used by website designers to explain to the search engines exactly what your website is all about. They look like this,

title Put title of your page here, include important keywords /title

meta name="Description" content="Put a short keyword rich description of your site here" /

meta name="Keywords" content="Put your keywords in here" /

meta name="AUTHOR" content="Your name or company name here" /

meta name="COPYRIGHT" content=" Your name or company name here " /

meta name="DISTRIBUTION" content="Global" /

meta name="RATING" content="General" /

meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /

meta name="revisit-after" content="1 Week" /

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /

Note: the opening and closing brackets have been missed off to make this article compatable for publication.

These tags should be placed inside the HEAD and /HEAD of your page. You don't really need to worry to much about what each one means, just be sure to include lots of keyword rich phrases in the " description" tag and all the carefully chosen keywords in the "keywords" tag. The rest is self-explanatory. Although not all search engines bother with these tags it is important that you include them for the engines that do use them.

You can always get them done free online at http://www.submitcorner.com/Tools/Meta/

The title tag is the important one, it's your shop window if you like. Target the right keywords or phrase as I showed you in part one, (you can still view it http://www.small-website-advice.com/wordpress/) and be sure to include it in your title tag for maximum effect. If every page has a different description in the title tag at the top of the page you can expand the number of searches you can compete for

More tips with tags

Another title tag is the tag you can use after a url such as this

a href="http://made-up-name.com" title="here is the result" target="_blank" The title tag (in between opening and closing tags)

If you hover over the resulting link you will see "here is the result", if this phrase were in your keywords list then this would also count with the search engines. Make the page loads up in a new window by using the "target="_blank" command, that way your visitor stays with you.

Use the "alt" tag that you can use when adding links to pictures, for example;

img src="yourpicture.gif" width="150" height="100" alt="another keyword here"(in between opening and closing tags)

Adding your keywords in these places will add more weight to your site, you should hopefully see an improvement in your position.

Basic Page Design

The first thing about page design is that search engines read web pages from the top left-hand corner down. Why is this important? Well, the placing of your keywords (yep! Them again) is vital, you should have at least one in-between h1 /h1 tags and if possible at the top of the page. As well as this you should have any ads such as google on the right hand side of the page, keeping your content on the left-hand side. An even scattering of keywords in your page text should help and you should have a keyword near the end of the page.

Don't have to many pictures if you can help it, most browsers' only load 4 pictures at a time and this can seriously slow down the page load time and put people off your site. You are better off having pictures on inside pages where your visitors are happier to wait; they do after all want to see your products.

Avoid garish colours, flashing banners and masses of text that you don't need, you don't want to scare your potential customers away or lead them to another person's website via an ad before you get them to view your site.

Most of all you should get you page scrutinised by a friend who is going to be honest with you, or find a forum that will do a constructive site review for you, you can find a forum like this here. The eyes of another person will not be tainted with the same "this is my baby" eyes that you have as the designer.

That's it for now, next time we move on to talk about advertising.

Mark white has been involved in IT for 16 years and has been active in internet marketing and web design for 5 years.

For help and advice please visit small-website-advice.com