To SEO, If you don’t do this right, Don’t write

I want to be lazy and take things out of the iSEO book and make a SEO blog post, just to keep blogging.  Some of you know that Keith and I are exhausted working 10+ hour days almost 7 days a week for the last 22 months.  So working hard is in our bones, but if you don’t work smart, don’t work at all.  Same goes with SEO, and the Key to your eSuccess on SEO is always about the proper keywords. And, there is no more important Place for keywords usage than Meta Tags. I am shocked by how many companies just have their company name, and no keywords describing their business. What is wrong people, do you Not care about being found?

So here is an excerpt from the iSEO blog book. Enjoy the chapters or paragraphs:

4. A word about Keyword Placement It is very important that you place some of your best “keyword text” on your web page before your images as viewed in linear order from the source code. That’s because search engines page content via the source code in linear order and they don’t give a hoot about actual images. Instead, they look only at the text on the page as revealed by the source code. Although images may look nice at the top of your page, they do nothing to help your site’s findability on the SE’s.

Therefore, by placing meaningful small font keyword text at the top of your page – before your image – you can still place your logo near the top of your web site while favorably appealing to the SE’s that are looking for relevant keywords at the top of your page. Therefore, be sure to “Headline” your page with text that the search engines can recognize as relevant to what you are offering – AND place the text early in your page’s source code prior to where the images appear whenever possible. Remember, it is these keywords and keyphrases through which people will find you on the Internet. Keyword Selection Use a keyword tool to find the most targeted keywords for your site. Develop grouped themes of keywords that reflect the different sections of
your site. Keep an eye out for keywords longer than one word (phrases). Keeping within a grouped theme, choose different keywords to target each page.

5. Meta Tags For the novice it must be explained that Meta Tags are non-displayed text written into your HTML document intended to describe your page to the SE for the purpose of cataloging the content of your page. Although there is some debate as to whether or not Meta Tags should be included in your HTML document, let’s put the debate to rest. The answer is a resounding YES – the Meta description tag absolutely should be included in your document. Here’s why: many engines use The Meta description tag as the summary for your site when listed in the search results. It’s what tells a real person whether or not your site is relevant to their search. You should view it as a sales presentation for your link.

If the Meta description tag entices the searcher they will, theoretically, click your link and visit your site. Obviously that’s the purpose for being listed in the search engine in the first place. If you omit the Meta description tag then the search engine is likely to fabricate a description for your site based on arbitrary text gleaned from somewhere on your page. Here’s an example of a real-life “bad” description we found when searching for Hawaii scuba diving… Link Title: Hawaii scuba diving Summary Description: Click here to go …now, we’re pretty sure that company didn’t really want “click to go home” used as their site description but that’s what they got because they failed to use a meta description tag.

Another possibility is that the SE will omit the summary description entirely if it fails to find something useful within your page to use as a summary. In either case, a potential site visitor is less motivated to click your link if you fail to properly utilize the meta description tag. Meta Tag Character Limits Most search engines place a limit on the number of characters contains. Once the limit is reached they typically ignore In general, 250 characters – including spaces and commas thumb that falls within the guidelines of most engines. However, in case a search engine uses less than, say, wise to place the most important part of your description beginning in the event the engine truncates the tag. Meta Keywords Tag The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve targeted for that specific page.

6. Turn Images From Liabilities To Assets – ALT Tag The problem with images in your web page is that the search engines do not index them at all. Therefore, your company logo may say what you are, who you are, and even state a benefit but the engines can’t index your images and therefore will not reflect their message in a keyword search results. In fact, if your image loads higher on your page (when viewing the source code) than your text, then your page starts out handicapped in a BIG way! This is a mistake. Whenever possible, avoid placing images higher on your page than keyword text. Regardless, when you do put images in your page, make them work for you, not against you by including the < ALT = here are some appropriate Keywords”> in your <IMG SRC = “image”> tags. The reason for doing this is because engines have been known to index the <IMG ALT = “Keywords”> tag.

By placing strategic keywords within the <IMG ALT = “Keywords”> tag, you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose. When a search engine’s algorithm is programmed to give credit for keywords within this tag, you win. If not, nothing lost – since none of the engines are known to penalize for using it.

Go blog your way to the Top, some of you noticed our post in the Blogging coach on Saturday about the Google Page Rank update, did you see that this page got a PR 4, just to start off with. Wow, thanks Google!

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