|
Link Popularity and Link Importance
Many search engines include your link popularity score in the algorithms they use to determine your site's rank. Your link popularity score is the total number of external sites that link to yours. Link importance is the other factor included in the weighted score. Link importance assings a "quality" point value to the external sites that link to yours. For instance, if CNN links to your site, that single link might count a lot more than 20 links from your friends' personal Web sites. Google uses link popularity almost exclusively to rank sites.
What can you do to increase your Link Popularity and Link Importance Score?
- Publicise your site - get on line news services or trade associations to link to you.
- Consider link exchanges with partner companies, clients, etc.
- Beware of unscrupulous SEO software companies that offer or use "shadow" domains - Google will drop you completely.
- You can submit your domain to Google for FREE by going to: Google Add URL Page.
|
Keyword Selection
The keywords you select must be intuitive and popular, yet not too general that your site will get lost in the 500,000 pages returned for "computers". It is often best to incorporate key word phrases like "consulting company specializing in content management". Don't rely on yourself for this process - ask friends, partners, clients what they would search on if they were trying to find you. Another important point is not to waste valuable space including keywords/phrases yous site can't deliver on - ie. "Proof that the String Theory of Physics and the Easter Bunny do exist". You will need to cull you keywords/phrases list so that when you build your META tag, it does not exceed 1024 characters including spaces.
Lastly, try your search words and see what results you get. To view the keywords on a page, use your browser option to View/Source in Internet Explorer and View/Page Source in Netscape. You'll probably get lots of inspiration from this exercise. Don't forget to develop keywords for each page you want optimized.
Other things to consider when making your keyword/phrase list:
- Plurals ("computer" and "computers").
- Perhaps including a common misspelling would be beneficial, (Can't think of any for computer", but you get the point.)
- Try not to use the exact same word more than 5 times, even in a phrase.
|
|
META Tags
META tags were originally created to help search engines classify sites. Now they are just one small part of your overall ranking score. META tags should always be used between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags in the basic structure of your page. Below is a quick primer on the two most important and how they should be used.
Description Meta:
<META NAME="description" content="Place your most important keyword phrases in the description of your site. Use less than 250 characters including spaces.">
Keywords Meta:
<META NAME="keywords" content="List your keyword phrases by level of relavence and importance. Seperate them by commas. Do not exceed 1024 characters including spaces.">
Make sure you place these on each page you wish to optimize.
|
Titles
The title tag is another element in the header part of an HTML page framed by <title></title> tags. If you look on the very top of your screen, you will see the title of this page is: York Technology Studio | Quick Guide to Search Engine Optimization. This is also what will show up as the title of a result from search engine - usually the blue link you click on.
When you are writing your page title, keep in mind that Google only displays 66 characters and Yahoo displays 120 characters (including spaces.) A good title should be descriptive, yet simple and include keywords or phrases if possible. Too many words can water down the hits on your Title.
|
