This is a very basic optimization guide on how to apply some simple web page optimizations to your website. The first thing you should do is to make sure that your Header Meta Tags are in place and represent the content of your web page accurately. Your Keywords also play an important role within these Meta Tags, so think about them carefully.

Optimization is a great way to improve your position in the search engines so that you get a steady stream of visitors to your website. You may have a really powerful and content rich website but if the competition have optimized their web pages better then you have, you will not get a high ranking in the search engine results pages. You may well find that your web pages are way down the list and very far away from page 1.

Basic guide to Search Engine Optimization

This is a very basic guide on how to apply some optimizations to your web pages. The first thing you should do is to make sure that your Header Meta Tags are in place and represent the content of your web page accurately. Your Keywords also play an important role within these Meta Tags, so think about them carefully.

Meta Tags

Before we go any further we should understand what a Meta Tag is

Definition

A specific kind of HTML tag that contains information not normally displayed to the user. Meta tags contain information about the page itself, hence the name ("meta" means "about this subject") Typical uses of Meta tags are to include information for search engines to help them better categorize a page.

Page Title

The title tag should appear as the first item in your header, right after the opening tag. Aim to keep your title length under 70 characters, without going into too much detail, some search engine will only display as few as 69 characters in their listings, in this case Google, others will show more. Make sure that some of your main keywords appear in the first few words of your title. Think of your Title as the Headline of your article so make the title attractive. You can use all Uppercase to make it stand out, but sometimes this just doesn't look right, your will have to decide.

Description

Example Search Engine result displayed as Page Title then Description. If there is no description the search engine will take some random sentence or words from the first paragraph of your content and display them. This may not truly represent the content of your page and it will most certainly not be attractive or may not even match your title.

Keep your Description to a maximum of 200 characters and make sure that the first few words are the main keywords. Make sure that the Title and the description work together as a team to maintain the reading flow.

Keywords

Whilst this particular meta tag is becoming less important these days it still pays to include it in your web page as a ‘just in case' thing. Its not bad practice to include it but there are some spiders out there that may still be using this met0a tag. You should enter each keyword separated by a comma; list your keywords in order of importance. Use a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 50 keywords.

Robots - Index and Follow

This tells the search engine spider how to index and follow your links on the web page.

If you do not want a search engine to index or follow the links therein then simply enter "noindex, nofollow" in the string. This is useful if it is page with a contact web form in it.

If you want the web page indexed but none of the links followed then enter "index, nofollow" in the string.

If you want the web page links followed but the actual page not indexed then enter "noindex, follow" in the string.

Revisit After

This Meta tag tells the search engine spider to return to this web page after a certain amount of time. This Meta tag is very useful for a constantly changing web page, but be careful not to over use it as it may use up a lot of your bandwidth. Do not use this Meta tag on Static Web page, that is a web page where the content will never change.

DocType

There are many DOCTYPE available and this should not be overlooked. It basically tells the web browser what document type it is looking at. You should research DOCTYPE in your search engine for a more detailed explanation. The most popular DOCTYPE can be explained at www.w3.org