Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves making Web pages more search engine friendly to give them a better ranking in search engines.

If you succeed in optimizing your pages in the right way, you will be awarded with top rankings, which can result in thousands of monthly visitors to your site.

Why is Search Engine Optimization important?

Search Engine Optimization is important because over 80% of Internet users reach Websites through search engines. If your Website is not ranked at the top of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, HotBot, and Lycos, you will be losing a lot of traffic.

Search Engine Optimisation is basically about following search engine rules. If your Web page fits the criterias that a search engine considers the most important factors in terms of relevance, then it will reward your site with a top ranking. This gives the Web pages a better chance of being selected by the search engines as the most relevant page for the search query.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are HTML tags used to describe various aspects about a Web page. The two most important meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords tags.

Meta description tags

The contents of meta description tags are indexed by some search engines as the page description in its search engine results.

However, meta description tags is often misused with false descriptions about a page. As a result, the relevancy of search results are often compromised, so search engines have begun to ignore the contents of the tag.

Some search engines, such as AltaVista and Inktomi, still index the contents of a meta description tag for its search results. But if the meta description tag is missing, the search engine will usually extract a description from the body text.

Search engines index the first 135-249 characters of the meta description tag contents. So write a short description of your site. The description should be like an introduction to your web site.

Include the most important keywords at the beginning of the tag. But, don’t just fill the description tag with keywords.

Meta keywords tags

The contents of a meta keyword tag is used to help define the important keywords of a page.

However, the keywords tag is often misused by adding a lot of irrelevant keywords. So much that some search engines totally ignore the contents of the meta keywords tag.

One of the search engines that still indexes the keywords tag is Inktomi. Since Inktomi provides search results for top search engines such as MSN, HotBot and Overture, it would still be a good idea to include the meta keywords tag in your Web pages.

You should only include the most important keyword phrase in the content of the tag. The meta keywords tag should be placed close to the meta description tag.

The keywords are usually separated by commas but some search engine optimizers recommend leaving out the commas, so that it creates more keyword combinations for the search engines to index.

I have seen a few web sites with good rankings separate their keywords with spaces instead of commas.

HTML Tags

The three most important HTML tags in search engine optimization are title tags, header tags, and alt tags.

Title tags

Most of the major search engines give the most relevance to keywords in the title tags within the Web page. You must include title tags for every page on your site. Short keyword rich descriptions in title tags are better than long ones.

Header tags

Many of the major search engines still place a lot of relevance on keywords in header tags. Keyword rich header tags on your Web pages can help you achieve good ranking.

Alt tags

Alt tags are used to describe an image. It’s a good idea to use keyword rich descriptions in the alt tags, as some search engines index the keywords.

Also, consider adding a period “.” at the end of the alt text.

I will be discussing more about keywords and link popularity soon.

Feel free to comment here on this topic.