Meta Tags
As soon as we work out what our ideal keywords and key-phrases are we must make sure that this information is set out correctly. If you do not set out your Meta Tags properly the search engine will randomly select text from your site to dis play under your search item.
Title Tags
The Title Meta Tag appears at the top of the browser window or can be described as the heading of the search result. If this is worded very carefully it can help to differentiate your site from your competitors.
Description Tags
The Description Meta Tag displays the description of your site in the search engine results, underneath the Title Tag. the maximum number of characters that can be used is 250 so it is more effective to create short and crisp but accurate, keyword rich copy that best describes the content of the site.
Keyword Tags
The Keyword Meta Tags were once very powerful because they were sought by the search engines and converted into the results of their searches. The Major search engines no longer take any notice of the Meta Tags but some smaller search engines might still do so. This tends to be a low priority.
Alt Tags
When you hover your mouse over an image or text link,if coded, the text you see is called the Alt Tags. They are considered as good coding practice because search engines can only read text, Not images. Alt Tags can aid the optimisation process by allowing the search engines to match the description to the search.
Website Copy
It is vitally important to consider two main elements when writing the copy of your website. The copy must satisfy the needs of your site visitors and the requirements of the search engines. It must be easy to understand and have the keyword density and placement.
Keyword Density
This is the ratio of a keyword or key-phrase to the total number of words (referred to as the depth) on a page. It is a major influence on search engine optimisation. To improve search engine ranking, your keyword density must not be too high or too low.
Best practice is to aim for a keyword density of between 2% and 7%. Stuffing keywords together , separated by commas is known as keyword stuffing. Search engines may see this as spam and will consequently penalise your rankings.
Keyword Placement
Strong website copy places keywords and key phrases towards the top of the page. Yet one good tip is to also end the last paragraph of copy with a relevant keyword.
Validation
Validation is the process of minimising coding errors and fixing broken links. This is part of SEO that you are unlikely to notice but will have a dramatic effect on your ranking. Cleaning up any errors in your web pages is a vital task. Generally , mark up languages such as HTML or XHTML will be used to write the pages.
