"How to Design Site to be Search Friendly?" by Dipen (Part 3)”

The awesome information this article contains is,

• Fine-Tuning Your Keyword Phrases

• Assign Specific Keywords to Specific Pages

• Title Tags—Use Descriptive Page Titles

• Keywords Meta-Tag

• Description Meta-Tag

Fine-Tuning Your Keyword Phrases

        Now that you have your master keyword list, probably with a few hundred keyword phrases, you have to drill down and figure out which keywords you are going to target for each page of your Web site that you want to optimize. Keep in mind that each page you optimize should lean toward a different set of keywords. Why? What good is buying 100 lottery tickets for the next drawing if they all have the same number? It is the same idea here.
        Your efforts should focus around those keyword phrases that bring in a fair volume of traffic and that are highly targeted. The return on investment for such keywords will be much higher. When reviewing your keyword list, you need to consider:

• • Which keywords are vital to your objectives

• • Which keywords are popular enough to generate reasonable, sustainable traffic

• • Which keywords do not have so much competition that it would be  counterproductive considering the time and effort necessary to target them.

         For a car dealership to have the keyword car stand alone on the dealership’s Web site would prove a waste of effort. Car is a vastly popular keyword, which is good, but it is too generic and too competitive to be worthwhile. You have to make judgment calls from time to time. In some cases a word is relevant and popular, but also competitive to the point of being intimidating. If this word is essential to your business, however, then go for it. 

      Organize your keywords according to their level of importance. When completed, you will have a refined master keyword list that you can refer to when optimizing your Web site. Also, different directories allow different numbers of keywords to be submitted. Because you have organized the list with the most important words first, you can simply include as many of your keywords as the directory allows.

          You can begin editing the list by deleting words that either are too generic (for example, business) or are not appropriate for keyword purposes. Review each word and ask yourself, “Would people search using this word if they were looking for the products and services available through my Web site?”

          For each page that you are optimizing, take a copy of the comprehensive master list and delete words that are not appropriate for that particular page. Reprioritize the remaining keywords based on the content of the page you are indexing. Now take the keyword phrase you have assigned to this page and put it at the top of the list. This is the keyword list for that particular page. Repeat this procedure for every page you are optimizing. This is also a great procedure when you are developing the keyword meta-tag for each page of your site.

        What I just covered is a very basic approach to organizing keywords. If you are up to the challenge, you can take it further by adding weights and multipliers to your keyword list to further refine it. You can choose to keep it basic while you are learning the ropes, but as

you become more familiar you might want to be more critical in selecting your keywords, to boost your performance in the search engines. The more knowledge you are armed with, the better prepared you are to optimize your Web site. Here are some additional tips to keep in mind when refining your keywords master list:

• • Plural and singular keywords—There is some debate about whether it is better to use only the plural version of a keyword or whether it is best to use both the plural and singular forms. Is your target market looking for both? As an example, some people might search for picture frame, and others might search for picture frames. Google matches exactly what the user searches for, so it is important to use both where possible.
• • Using the names of your competitors—There is often the question as to whether to include your competitor’s name in your keywords. The idea here is that if someone looks for your competitor, they are going to find you as well. Never include a competitor’s name in your keywords. Because several search engines read only a small amount of content for keywords, you lose valuable page real estate to irrelevant keywords when you use your competitor’s name. In addition, there have been recent legal battles regarding the use of competitors’ names within one’s keywords.

• • Common misspellings of words—There are many words that people misspell on a frequent basis. The question here is, do you include those misspelled keywords in your site or not? My stance is “No.” Although people use them in their searches, it hurts your credibility in that you come off as a company incapable of correctly spelling its own products and services. There are exceptions to every rule. Canadian sites often have U.S. customers as their target market and U.S. sites often have Canadian customers as their target market. There are a number of words that are spelled differently by these countries—theatre in Canada is theater in the United States, centre in Canada is center in the United States, colour in Canada is color in the United States, for example. If you are caught with one of your important keywords spelled differently by your target market, you might want to optimize a page of your site to accommodate this. Perhaps you might offer a page that is designed for Our Canadian Friends or for Our American Friends.

• • Case sensitivity—Some search engines are not case-sensitive and others are. Regardless, most people search in lowercase, so to keep the process simple; for now you should record your original keyword master list using lowercase. Once you begin finalizing your keyword list, you might notice that people are actually searching for the proper spelling of a word, in which case you would reflect the changes in your keyword list.

• • Modifiers—A modifier is a keyword you add to your primary keyword phrase to give it a boost. Who simply searches for a hotel at random? It doesn’t make sense. You look for a hotel in combination with a destination. In this case, the destination is the modifier. As a side note, local search is becoming increasingly popular, so if the local market plays a significant role in the success of your business, be sure to use geographic modifiers accordingly.

• • Multiple-word keyword phrases—Two- or three-keyword phrases perform better than single keywords. According to OneStat.com (http://www.onestat.com), people tend to use two- and three-word phrases when performing a search online. Here is a list of the most popular number of words used in a search phrase:

• – Two words—28.38 percent

• – Three words—27.15 percent

• – Four words—16.42 percent

• – One word—13.48 percent

• – Five words—8.03 percent

• – Six words—3.67 percent

• – Seven words—1.36 percent

• – Eight words—0.73 percent

• – Nine words—0.34 percent

• – Ten words—0.16 percent.

           Not only are multiple-keyword phrases used more often by searchers, but using them also enables you to be more descriptive in the modifiers to your keyword phrases.

Assign Specific Keywords to Specific Pages

           The next step is to allocate specific keywords to specific pages of your site for

search engine optimization. You then populate each page in the appropriate places with the assigned keyword. You do this because you want to ensure that no matter which keyword or keyword phrase your target market decides to search on, one of the pages on your site is likely to rank in the first couple of pages of search results.

           Many sites populate all their pages with the same keywords in the hopes that one of their pages will rank high in the search results. They use the same meta-tags for every page on their site. Again, this is the same as buying 100 tickets on the lottery but selecting the same numbers for every single ticket.
          Some search engines rank sites by how early the keyword appears on the site. The earlier a keyword is mentioned on your site, the more points earned and the higher your site may be positioned in search results. And remember what was stressed earlier: Though you don’t want to repeat a keyword hundreds of times (some search engines are on to this), you do want to repeat the keywords assigned to that particular page a number of times on that page of your site.

          When you have allocated your keywords to the various pages on your site, you will populate or include the keyword phrases assigned in the appropriate places for that particular page. Let’s take a closer look at all those appropriate places.

Title Tags—Use Descriptive Page Titles

         It is extremely important that all Web pages have titles. Title tags are viewed as one of the most important elements of search engine optimization when it comes to keyword placement. Each of the pages on your Web site should be given a title.

        The title is inserted between the title tags in the header of an HTML document. <HEAD> indicates the beginning of the header, and the ending of the header is marked by </HEAD>. A simplified version might look like:

• • <HTML>

• • <HEAD>

• • <TITLE>Document Title Here</TITLE>

• • <META-NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“keyword1, keyword2, keyword3”>

• • <META-NAME=“description” CONTENT=“200-character site description goes here”>

• • <META-NAME=“robots” CONTENT=“index, follow”>

• • <!—Comments tag, repeat description here>

• • </HEAD>

          Title tag information identifies and describes your pages. Titles tell readers where the information contained on a page originated. Most Web browsers display a document’s title in the top line of the screen. When users print a page from your Web site, the title usually appears at the top of the page at the left. When someone bookmarks your site or adds it to their “Favorites,” the title appears as the description in his or her bookmark file. These are all reasons that it is important that a page’s title reflect an accurate description of the page. More importantly, the title tag is typically what the target market sees in search

results in some of the major search engines. In Figure 2.3 you can see that a typical search result consists of the title tag as the link to the Web site, a brief description of the Web site, and the URL.

              Every page of your Web site should have a unique title tag and each title tag should accurately describe the page content. Your target market should be able to read the title tag and understand what the page they are about to view contains. Keep your title tags brief—in the realm of five to ten words. The longer your title tag is, the more diluted your keywords become and the more likely your title tag is to be truncated by a search engine. Google displays a maximum of 66 characters. Yahoo!Search, on the other hand, permits up to 120 characters for a title tag. Presently Google and Yahoo!Search are the two most important search engines; use their requirements as an approximation when designing

your title tag
           My advice is to include your most important keyword phrases first, within Google’s 66-character range. Overspill, or less important keywords, can run into the excess space that Yahoo!Search allows. By including your most important keywords first, you secure their position for use by the search engines and for browser bookmarks.

          The shorter and more accurate the title tag is, the higher the keyword density and relevancy for that title tag. Try to keep your use of a keyword phrase to a single instance if possible, unless the title tag truly warrants duplication. In the case of a hotel, the word hotel might appear twice in a title—once for the hotel’s proper company name and once in a descriptive term such as a targeted geographic area.

           Match the keywords you use in your meta-tags with the words you use in your page titles. Search engines check page titles, meta-tags, and page content for keywords. For certain keywords, your pages will be more relevant and, therefore, will place higher in the search engines if these keywords appear in each of these three sections. Position your keywords near the beginning of your page titles to increase your keyword relevancy.

          Some of the search engines retrieve your page, look at your title, and then look at the rest of your page for keywords that match those found in the title. Many search engines use title tags as one of the elements in their algorithm to determine search engine ranking. Pages that have keywords in the title are seen as more relevant than similar pages on the same subject that don’t, and may thus be ranked in a higher position by the search engines. However, don’t make your title a string of keywords because this is often  considered spam by the search engines and you end up worse off in the rankings or removed altogether. Also keep in mind that people will see that title in the search results, and they’re more likely to click on a site that has a title that flows and is descriptive—not a list.

Keywords Meta-Tag

           As we noted earlier in this article, a common problem faced by Internet marketers is how to influence search engines to index their site appropriately and how to ensure that their site appears when people use relevant search criteria.

           Retaining a certain measure of control over how search engines deal with your Web site is a major concern. Often Web sites do not take advantage of the techniques available to them to influence search engine listings. Most search engines evaluate the HTML meta-tags in conjunction with other variables to decide where to index Web pages based on particular keyword queries.
           Although in recent years fewer points have been allocated to content in the keywords meta-tags, it is important to keep your eyes on the total score—if there are any points at all allocated to this element, you want them all. As we’ve already mentioned, the site with the highest total score appears at the top of the search results, so you are going after every point you can get.

          The Web Developer’s Virtual Library defines an HTML meta-tag as follows:

The META element is used within the HEAD element to

embed document meta-information not defined by other HTML

elements. The META element can be used to identify properties of

a document (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of keywords, etc.)

and assign values to those properties.

An HTML tag is used in the HEAD area of a document to

specify further information about the document, either for the

local server or for a remote browser. The meta-element is used

within the HEAD element to embed document meta-information

not defined by other HTML elements. Such information can be

extracted by servers/clients for use in identifying, indexing, and

cataloging specialized document meta-information. In addition,

HTTP servers can read the contents of the document HEAD to

generate response headers corresponding to any elements defining

a value for the attribute HTTP-EQUIV. This provides document

authors with a mechanism for identifying information that should

be included in the response headers of an HTTP request.

          To summarize this lengthy definition, meta-information can be used in identifying,

indexing, and cataloging. This means you can use these tags to guide the

search engines in displaying your site as the result of a query. There are many

meta-tags, including:

• • Abstract

• • Author

• • Copyright

• • Description

• • Expires

• • Keywords

• • Language

• • Refresh

• • Revisit

• • Robots.

         Most of these meta-tags are not useful for optimization purposes. The most recognized meta-tag is the keywords meta-tag. <META-NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“…”> tells search engines under which keywords to index your site. When a user types one of the words you listed here, your site should be displayed as a result. A space or comma can be used to separate the words. Do not repeat the keyword frequently; rather, repeat the keyword about five times in different phrases. You do have the option of using more than 1,000 characters in your keywords meta-tag, but be wary of keyword dilution. You should create a unique keywords tag for each page of your site that lists the appropriate keywords for that particular page.

Description Meta-Tag

           <META-NAME=“description” CONTENT=“…”> should be included on every page of your Web site. The description meta-tag is used to supply an accurate overview of the page to which it is attached. The description meta-tags can influence the description in the search engines that support them. It is best to keep the description meta-tag to somewhere between 200 to 250 characters in total. Be sure to use the same keywords applied elsewhere on the page being optimized in the description meta-tag for consistency and relevancy; however, do not duplicate your title tag in your description meta-tag, or you may run the risk of being accused of keyword stacking. Also, it helps to include a call to action encouraging the target market to visit your Web site or take some other action.