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Therefore, in THIS newsletter, let's delve a little deeper into the topic – Visibility.
There are several things that you need to do in order to make your website more visible to search engines. Keywords are one of them. Most major search engines, including Google, ranks your website and bring traffic to your websites or blogs based on keywords that are relevant to what your website or blog is about.
We have also seen how important it is to have good content on your website in previous newsletters. So, I hope that you have been working hard to bring unique content to your websites and blogs. What does it mean to be 'visible'? It means your website must be filled with unique, fresh content that contains your preferred keywords placed strategically so that Search Engine spiders can pull them up and rank your site based on those keywords.
And sometimes, it is about what the eye don't see. Hidden within the codes of a website are what we call Tags. And we'll start with the Title tag.
Title Tag
The Title Tag is one tag in the codes that you CAN see and is often placed at the very top of the page's coding. It is incredibly important that you place proper keywords in this tag because it is the most basic thing to do. Google sees it before it sees anything else. But what keywords would you want to place in the Title Tag?
Do a little bit of homework. Analyze keywords relevant to your industry, find them, pluck them out, see how many people are actually using the keywords to find you (and your competitors) and place them into the Title Tag section within the pages of your websites.
The Title Tag should be a short writeup of 10 to 60 characters, minus any special characters. With limited space, the special characters would only be a waste of time and space. For example, if I wanted Google to crawl my website or blog (it is, suffice to say, much easier for Google to crawl my blog because it is frequently updated) for my preferred keyword 'Internet Marketing Consultant Malaysia', here's what I do. It is getting more and more important to focus on geo-location these days, so, take that into account when selecting your keywords.
Here's a screenshot of what I did to the first page of my website.
Meta Description and Meta Keyword
Next thing we have to do is putting suitable keywords in your Meta Description and Meta Keyword. The characters for Meta Description should be less than 200. Meta descriptions can be any length but search engines generally truncate snippets longer than 160 characters, For this reason it is best to keep meta descriptions between 150-160 characters. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body. If not, it will be penalized for irrelevance. NO single word should appear more than twice in the Meta Keyword as it is considered spam.
But Google announced in September of 2009 that neither meta descriptions nor meta keywords factor into Google's ranking algorithms for web search. Google uses meta descriptions to return results when searchers use advanced search operators to match meta tag content, as well as to pull preview snippets on search result pages, but it's important to note that meta descriptions do not to influence Google's ranking algorithms for normal web search. It may not important to search engine rankings, are extremely important in gaining user click-through from search engine result pages (SERPs).
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. Most of the top blogs and websites have about 2% to 5% of keyword density. Some of the blogs and websites have more than 5%. But regardless how many percent of keyword density, always remember you don’t overdo for search engines, it is humans who read your articles.
Heading Tag
Why heading tags are so important? This is because heading tags are used by search engines to identify words which are more important than the rest of the page text. The theory is that headings will sum up the topic of the page, so they are counted as important keywords. More weight is given to keywords that appear within H1 tags, then H2 tags and so on.
Phrases and Sentences
Google lives in a world of interrelated phrases. If you are targeting Internet Marketing as a key phrase then do not split the words up if possible. Some effect is noticed if the words are split, but much more benefit is received by including the phrase as a whole. Using “emphasized” and “strong emphasized” in your phrases denote phrases that you think is more important than the surrounding text. Google wants to know what you think is the most important part of a sentence.
Images Alt Text
Include your keyword at least once in the Alt tag of any images. Ensure that the text is relevant to the image and gives some information.
Keywords in URLs
According to Matt Cutts who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. With keywords in URL, it does help a little bit of search engine ranking but just don't overdo it otherwise, Google will consider that's spamming.
You can view the video here:
Creating Sitemap
Last but not least, creating a Sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. In addition, you can also use Sitemaps to provide Google with metadata about specific types of content on your site, including video, images, mobile, News, software source code, and geographical (KML).
