Preparing Your Website For Search Engines, Part 2
Your homepage is the most important page on your web site
If you concentrate your most important keywords and key phrases in your homepage many times, the search engines will surely notice and index it accordingly. But will it still read easily and will the sentences flow freely to your real human visitors? There are some good chances that it might not.
As a primer, having just 40 or 50 words on your homepage will not deliver the message effectively. To be powerful and effective, a homepage needs at least 300 to 400 words for maximum search engine throughput and effectiveness. If you don’t have Microsoft Word or word processor that will auto word count your content, use the FREE SERVICE HERE.
One way to do that is to increase your word count with more value-added content. This often means rewriting your whole homepage all over again. The main reason to do this is you will probably never have enough room to skillfully work your important keywords and key phrases into the body text of your homepage. This may not please your boss or marketing department or yourself, but a full re-write is often necessary and highly advisable to achieve high rankings in the engines, while at the same time having a homepage that will please your site visitors and convert a better proportion of them into real buyers.
One mistake some people do is to force their prospects to wade through endless key phrase lists or paragraphs, in an attempt to describe their features and benefits. The other reason they do that is they’re trying to please the search engines at the same time. Writing a powerful and effective homepage around carefully defined keywords and key phrases is a sure way you can drive targeted traffic to your web site and keep them there once you do. But use some common sense to reach a happy medium between what your customers want land the search engines want.
If some people still say re-writing a homepage takes too much time and costs too much money, think of the cost of losing prospective clients and the real cost of lost sales and lost opportunities. In the end, writing a strong homepage that will achieve all your desired goals will largely justify your time invested and the efforts you will have placed in the re-writing of your homepage.
We discussed the importance of the Homepage. This section presents a recommended layout for your homepage in order to make it as search engine friendly as possible. This is where you set the theme of your site.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is proper coding. The easier it is for a search engine to get through your content, the better chance you will have of it being indexed properly. Don’t get sloppy with your html code. Find a validator you like here
Let's suppose the primary focus of your site is about online education. You also have secondary content that is there as alternative content for those not interested online education. There is also other content that you would like to share with your visitors. For example, this might include book reviews, humor, free resources and links.
The top of your homepage, as discussed earlier is the most important. This is where you set the keywords and theme for the most important part of your site, the thing you really want to be found for. So you might start off the top of your home/index page something like this:
(Before your logo or header graphic is preferred.)
1) A heading tag that includes a keyword(s) or keyword phrases. A heading tag is bigger and bolder text than normal body text, so a search engine places more importance on it because you emphasize it. The keywords should be the same as you use in your <title> keywords </title> html title tag. This is what places your page title in the title bar at the top of the web page.
Heading sizes range from h1 - h6 with h1 being the largest text. If you learn to use just a little Cascading Style Sheet code you can control the size of your headings. You could set an <h1> sized heading to be only slightly larger than your normal text if you choose, and the search engine will still see it as an important heading.
H1 TAGS – The Most Important Of The Heading Tags
H1 tags are used to identify the information contained on a web page. They are similar to the headlines found in a newspaper. When creating your website, you should always title your pages so visitors and search engines know what they are looking at and where to find it. But H1 tags serve another purpose as well. They entice search engine spiders to include the page in their search results because they are often the first place spiders look when trying to determine if the page is relevant.
Unfortunately, many people do not use H1 tags on their websites because it can alter the appearance of the pages and make them look disproportionate. But by using a CSS (cascading style sheet), you can alter the size of the title used on the page to give your website a more professional look while capturing the attention of web spiders.
Depending on the search engine, your H1 tag may be used as the description in search results, which means you need to be as accurate as possible when creating headlines for your pages so visitors will be more inclined to visit your site. You will also have to include keywords so web spiders will be able to find your pages quickly. By adding keywords to H1 tags, your web ranking may increase and outrank your competition.
The key to successfully using H1 tags lies in the keywords you choose. They have to accurately describe the page while also being popular enough to rank high on search results. While this may seem complicated, by creating a keyword list and using words that best describe the page, you can achieve your goals of higher search rankings and increase traffic to your site easily. Do Your Keyword Research :
After you have created a list of popular keywords, choose which ones you want to use on each page. If you are unsure about keyword density, you can
: use free tools available on the Internet
that can help calculate how many keywords to use on each page. Choose one keyword to include in each title. While you can use different keywords in different titles, using more than one keyword per title will cause the keywords to lose their value. Your site could be marked as spam by web spiders which will cause it to rank low on search result pages.
It is never a good idea to use more than one H1 tag on web pages. This will also devalue the keywords used. Make sure you update keywords from time to time to reflect the current popular words being used in searches.
By adding titles to your web pages, you will also help visitors easily navigate your site. Creating a site map that lists title pages and offers hyperlinks to them will make it even easier for visitors to see what you have to offer.
Creating internal links using keywords will also increase your web ranking. By connecting keywords with title pages and links, web spiders will quickly determine whether your site fits a particular search or not. By making it as easy as possible for web spiders, you will see your rank increase quickly on a variety of search engines.
In addition to adding keywords to your H1 tags, you should also use them in other headings on web pages as well. These tags are labeled H2, H3, and so on. While these titles attract less attention than an H1, many search engine spiders will look at them. Again, try to use one keyword per tag. You can use a keyword phrase that is similar to the keyword you have selected for your title so that the page is cohesive and informative. Overusing keywords will cause search engines to label your site as spam-dexing and penalize your ranking.
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Changing the keywords in your H1 tag should be done when changing other keywords on the page or when you do a complete re-write of the page.
Adding pages to your website is another way to increase web exposure. Make sure to add keywords to every new page you create in the content, title, and underneath images as search engines like
Google are now searching through images as well when deciding web rank.
If you don't know much about web design and decide to hire a web designer to create and launch your website, ask them to include H1 tags on all pages in your website with appearance controlled by a CSS. Look at it this way, even if you had the best looking website on the Internet, if few people see it, is it worth maintaining?
- Leon Edward
Learn more about seo search engine optimization from Home Business IT @ http://www.homebusinessit.com/searchengineoptimization.html
Leon Edward helps people to start, build, market and promote internet home business and ways to earn money online at home at http://www.HomeBusinessIT.com Get Your free legitimate internet business kit bonuses and training articles, visit http://www.homebusinessit.com/newsletter/
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