On Page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This is a very important area of internet marketing. Unfortunately all that experts can agree on is that SEO is necessary. The trouble is that the search engines do not tell us what their criteria are for ranking websites in their search results. This means that we have to discover this for ourselves. The only way to do this is through testing testing and more testing and the search engines keep changing in order to improve the results they give theor customers. This means filtering out the sites that we do not want our children to see and the ones we all try to avoid.
The Title Tag
In spite of the aforesaid, there are some basic rules that are a given. You could call them SEO 101. Always name your pages. If this seems obvious and you wonder why I even mentioned it, just do a search on any search engine for untitles.html. As I write this there are 34,900,000 results for this search term on Google. The title of the page is a strong indicator to both visitors and the search spiders (spiders or bots are the programs that crawl your website and index the web) of what the page is about. The title tag is also used in your favourites and bookmarks.
If you are building your site with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) program such as Dreamweaver, then you enter your page title into the title slot. The program will code it for you. If you are coding it yourself, this is what the tage looks like:
<title>YOUR TITLE HERE</title>
Replace the YOUR TITLE HERE with your own page title. There should be a different title on every page of your website. This is because the title will reflect the different content of each page. The title tag goes in the head section of the code page. i.e. between the <head> tag and the </head> tag. The <head> tag begins the head section and the </head> tag ends it. This is the area of the code where many items that are not seen on the page will be put. Thes include java and meta tags. They are necessary to the proper functioning of the page but with the exception of the title, will not show up on the page itself.
Meta Tags
The Description Tag
The next thing to do is the put in a description meta tag. The meta tags go in the head section. If you are coding the tags will look like this:
<meta name="description" content="A description of your page's contents." />
The description tag is often used in the search engine results description. In other words it may show in the listing you see in the search results. Therefore it is a good idea to make is a good description of what you have in the page and to use important keywords in it. Google goes not like excessively long or short descriptions. Two or three lines should do.
The Keyword Tag
The keyword tag is no longe used by most seach engines. This is thought to be because they are now much better at deciding what the content of the page is about and no longer need a keyword tag to help them figure it out. It is also thought that the demise of the keyword meta tag was hurried by the abuse of this tag in the past. It was once possible to rank highly by stuffing this tag with keywords, repeating them multiple times. This type of spamming often misled the search engines into showing the wrong or inappropriate page in the search results. They therefore no longer read them. This is true of most of the bigger search engines, but some of the smaller ones may still use them, so since it is easy to enter them and the do no harm, it might be a good idea to include them anyway. The keyword meta tag looks like this:
<meta name="keyword" content="Your Keywords Here" />
Make sure that the keywords in the keyword meta tag are used in the content, the title tag and the description tag.
The Robots Tag
The robots tag can be very useful. The robots tag gives instructions to the spiders. Most good spiders will obey them but email harvesters and spam bots etc will ignore everything and just do what they want. This is what the robots tag looks like:
<meta name="robots" content="index" />
The tag can be used to keep search engines that obey out of certain pages by replacing the" index" with "noindex". It can also be used for "follow" and "nofollow" which we will discuss on another page.
The robots.txt is a seperate page of instructions to the spiders/robots/bots and is much more useful than the robots tag. We will discuss it on another page.
Content
That done it is the turn of your content. You should try to ensre that each page is focused on a particular keyword that you want to show up fo in the search engines. To do this make sure that your keyword is used in most paragraphs on the page and in the h1 header tag and in the title of the page. Do not try to hit everything on every page. Using our earlier example of obesity in teenage girls, you might have one page focused on the difficulty of getting clothes another page focused on dating antother page focused on diets and so on. A well written article on each page focused on one aspect of the niche you are in will go a long way towards getting you the web traffic you want and a loyal following if your information is well presented, useful and updated regularly.
The leval of importance attributed to the on-page optimisation by experts varies from time according to the perceived level of importance given to it by the search engines. But it is always improtant to ust the proceduer outlined above and to keep your code clean. If your code is a mess, and the spiders find it difficult or impossible to read your web page, they are not likely to give your page a high rank.