Andrew Clacy

Archive for the ‘Linking’ Category

1.      Page Title – Many people overlook this or actually look too much into the title of your page. A good tip is to write for Google and not for your viewers. There is a way to do both but some view it as unethical, I will get into this later on.

1. Page Title The most important thing you really need to pay attention to is that the title of your page coincides with the contents of the page. Additionally it helps to have the word of phrase you want to be Indexed in Google in the actual title of your page.

For example, if you want to get your page on car detailing into Google you’re going to want to have a title like “Car Detailing 101” or “Car Detailing”. That’s what I said before but know you can actually see what I meant. It doesn’t really matter what the title is it just has to be relevant.

The title of your page is what partly tells Google what your page is about. Google is just a computer so it only understands so much. Keep it simple and you’re all set. By the way, the Title is part of what we call the “Meta” of “META” tags. Next, I’ll get into those.

2.      META Tags – You’ve probaly heard of Meta Tags before. They are not so much for people as they are for the spiders or bots that search engines use when looking for information. They tell the search engines stuff that only the search engines can see, technically we can see them too.

There are several META tags, you really only need to worry about three of them. All three are very important:

1.      The Title Tag – I previously went over this in the first part but just to recap, this tag is where you want to input the title of your page.

2.      The Keyword Tag – Again, this should be self explanatory but the keyword tag is where you input your keywords for your page. The only reason you put keywords into the META tag area is so the search engines can see them so it knows what to do with your page.

3.      The Description Tag – Like the other tags, we don’t do them to just waste time, we do them to talk to the search engines in there own languge. The description tag is where you input a description of the page you want indexed.

A common mistake with the description tag is to write a description about your whole site. Unless you are working in the main page or index page of your site this will be of no use to you or the search engines.

If your page is on “computer speakers” you’ll need to describe in brief detail what about computer speakers your page is about. Is it about how or where to buy them or how they are made or? You get my drift…

The description tag is sometimes the only tag that viewers can actually see in the search engine listings. Not always but sometimes when searched right or when the page is pulled from the index in the right way the surfer will see what yourdescription is.

Usually the page is displayed in the listing/index as a quick snippet of text from your page that the search engine thinks will be of interest to the surfer based on what they typed in the Search Box.

You’ll see in the picture above that there are more tags but despite what some people say, these are really of no use to you or the search engines. They don’t care that you took the time to put the extra tags in and won’t give you a better ranking or anything, you can do them if you want, they are 100% optional, some people like to do them, some don’t.

This isn’t an HTML design book so if you need further help with tags or where to put them that information is readily available for free all over the web. At least now you know what you need to do.

3.  Page Content – Again, some people will totally overlook this part or again look into it too much. I said previsouly that you want to try and write for Google and not for the actual viewer. This holds true for certain aspects of your page and not for other parts.

On one hand when you are writing for Google it may get you Indexed quickly and get you to appear high up in the listings. On the other hand if you are writing to appeal just to Google, it may leave the actual viewer of the page in a haze and they will just leave.

The best way to approach content is to just write informative, well layed out text and then go back and emphasize certain parts to make it SEO friendly. This basically means just making good use of your keywords through out the content.

When I write content I like to pick out my keywords first. If I am promoting a dental product for example, I pick five to ten targetted keywords. I wouldn’t bother with something like ‘dental product’ for a keyword or ‘dentist’ or anything that broad.

I use what they call ‘long tail keywords’. So for the example I used above for a dental product, lets say teeth whitening, I would use ‘quick teeth whitening’ instead of ‘teeth whitening’ or ‘how to get white teeth’ instead of ‘white teeth’.

You’re basically targeting people who are looking for a very specific thing. In the long run you may get less traffic but you’re getting a much more targeted or narrow audience which despite the name is a good thing.

Once you have the keywords you want to use for the page you sort of just write around the keywords. The keywords are going to match your page with the keywords that people are searching for so make sure you do some research.

4. The Page Layout and Design – If you look at some of the most popular and well known sites that you either heard about from an offline commercial or word of mouth or an online commerical or word of mouth what do you notice?

One thing that you should notice if you don’t is that they are never too fancy and they are always easy to navigate. Once again, this is not only intended to make it easy for the viewer to get around and appealing to them visually but the HTML code that is used to build it is clean and simple.

Remember when I said the spiders and robots that scour the internet are computers just like you are using now. They don’t care how fancy your page is. The more clean and simple the code, the better. 

It’s actually pretty simple. Indexing sort of means what is sounds like. Think about a book, when you want to find a certain part of page you generally look at the Index as opposed to aimlessly flipping through the pages trying to find what you want. An Index is basically a hierarchy of information.

When you’re talking about a search engine it’s pretty much the same thing. Except if you thought a 1,000 page book was a lot to go through, imagine a couple billion pages that can be searched in under a second. Well, welcome to Google.

Google has a huge Index as I just said. It’s always changing and growing but it’s usually packing around a one hundred billion or so pages. So Like I was saying it really is just a big book except you have to tell it what you want and not just see what it has to pick from.

Indexing is the process of getting your page into Googles Index. I previously stated that you don’t get automatically indexed in Google or any other search engine. Google is the best search engine to find information and for people to find your information so it’s good to be in there.

It doesn’t care if you made the page(s) two minutes, months, years of decades a go. Some of the older and other search engines won’t even put you in the index until your page or site has been on the net for at least a few months but usually a few years.

On the other hand, Google’s Index is always changing. What’s hot one hour sometimes is not so hot the next hour. Again, this like anything else is good and bad. You can search for something at 11 a.m. and it’s # 1, you can then search for the exact same thing and find that page has been moved down to # 1,999,823.

Google is all about relevance and popularity. In a lot of ways Search Engines are like teenagers. They highly value what other people think and the more popular and “in” you are, the better you’ll be treated.