To start off let me first explain what web search engines are. Web Search Engines are programs designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP; examples of Web Search Engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Among the information searched for on the World Wide Web are the web pages. In this website development tip I am going to take you through some of the key things that you should do on your web pages as part of preparing them for Web Search Engines.
If you want to improve on the rank of your pages in Web Search Engines then definitely you should prepare them just in the way expected. It’s high time I take you through some of the things you should do when preparing your web pages for Web Search Engines
URL Keywords
Make sure the page URL has some keywords related to page content. Do not use keywords that are not part of the page content.
Title
Add titles to your pages using the HTML title tag e.g. <title>The Title Goes Here</title>. Try as much as possible to stuff your title with some keywords from the page content but it should not be too long. The title should not be longer than 100 characters.
Meta
Add some meta to your pages, more importantly add the meta description and meta keywords. You can add meta description and keywords as follows.
<meta name=”description” content=”The page description goes here ” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”put, here, page, keywords, separated, with a, comma” />
Many people have a belief that the Meta description and keywords play a big role when it comes to ranking in Web Search Engines. Just to make a clarification on that, Meta description and keywords used to be a big issue so many years ago but today Web Search Engines do not give it too much attention to them since they were so much misused by webmasters to achieve good ranking. Web Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing base on so many other factors to rank pages. But hey, it doesn’t hurt you just add the meta description and keywords to your pages because they still have a role however small it is.
Remember not to include a keyword more than once in the meta keywords section since that may be looked at as spamming by Web Search Engines.
Alternate text for images
Web Search Engines cannot read images so the only way to explain to them what the image is about is by adding the alternate text describing it. Alternate text is added using the alt attribute of the img HTML tag as follows
<img src=”image.png” with=”50” height=”100” atl=”Add Alternate Text Here”>
Keywords In Anchor Text
Make sure the anchor text has some keywords about the page it’s linking to. To make this more clear assume you want to create an anchor link to a sign up page, It would be better you make Sign Up the anchor text than using click here as the anchor text.
This is good <a href=”sign-up.html”>Sign Up</a>
This is bad <a href=”sign-up.html”>Click Here</a>
Page Size
Always work towards coming up with pages that are not greater than 100kb when they have fully loaded into the browser.
Hyphen In URL
In cases where you wish to separate words in page URL use the hyphen
e.g http://www.mydomain.com/learning-mysql.htm
From the example above learning and mysql has been separated using a hyphen. Please note that you should not use more than 10 hyphens in the URL or else the Web Search Engines may end up looking at the URL as Spam.
URL Length
Make sure the page URL doesn’t go beyond 250 characters.
Content
The page content that resides between the HTML body tag should be well formatted. Use the bold and italics for emphasis, and use the heading tags to enclose all the headings.
With all the above done, that is a big step towards making your pages presentable to Web Search Engines hence doing some Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
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