In order for your website to get maximum exposure to potential users around the world you need to make sure you have designed it so that the search engines can readily catalog what your site is about.
The process of formatting your information for this most important function is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Right up front remember; there is no way to ever know exactly what the search engine logarithms are looking for when they index your site.
These indicators change routinely and the owners keep their details very close to the chest. This especially applies to what the giant Google uses to determine page rank in their search engine. There are, however, some very simple and necessary things you can do to make sure your pages have the best chance of being indexed in a high position. Many of these things do not even show up on your page but are the information you put in the Meta Tags in the header of your page code. The Meta Tags are the first thing the search engine "spider" will crawl through for data. Always have a different title for each page. If every page is titled the same, the search engine will determine it is all the SAME page.
The Meta Tag Description
Your Meta description is another tag that needs to be specific to each page. It tells the spider what the page is about. Keep it short and make sure you have utilized your primary keywords in the description. This also applies to your Meta Keywords. Here is where you list the important words and phrases that are included in the body copy of your web page. When a person types what they are looking for in a search box, the search engine will look for the Meta Description and Keywords that match what the user is looking for.
Write clean HTML code throughout your web page. With the new standards for coding being enforced more by web browsers, make sure you are not using archaic forms of HTML attributes. Always use lower case lettering in your HTML as upper case lettering is being phased out and will eventually not be recognized by future web browsers.
Remember, using your keywords in a Header will be more useful to the search engine spider than by merely making the topics a larger font size. Make sure you have a decent sprinkling of your keywords in the content on your page. This way the spider will know that you are actually discussing the topic in question. You should also make sure to always use the alt tag in images and use a keyword there as well.
Things To Avoid When Doing SEO
There are a few things to avoid when making your web page search engine friendly. Search engines either do not or cannot look into frames. Any important information you have framed will be lost on the search engine. Save the frame for its intended use of request forms and the like. Do not over saturate you page content with your keywords or it will be determined by the search engine that you are spamming it. Never try to pump up your keyword count by adding a block of words in a font color the same as your background so that they are invisible on the page. This will get you banned and blacklisted from ALL of the search engines.
There is an eternal discussion bordering on argument among webmasters about just what works for SEO and page ranking and what doesn't. The best thing to do is stop worrying so much and just make sure you have a clean, well written page that has been optimized as well as you can. If you create a quality site, it will get noticed.
