Search Tips and Tricks
Using these tips and tricks will teach you how to correctly design your web site, construct Meta tags and Keywords and submit your site for greater rankings. These tips are general in nature and you should explore the criteria for each individual engine and directory for their specific requirements.The title tag has been — and probably will always be — one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.
Title tags are equally as important as your visible text copy and the links pointing to your pages — perhaps even more so and they should contain specific Keyword Phrases.
Do not use the same Title Tags on all of your web pages!!! Each page you create should have it's own set of Title, Description and Keyword Tags pertinent to the web page content. Try to keep the length of the Title to less than 66 characters since Google will remove characters greater than 66 in length.
Don't use frames.
Search engines have trouble with frames since they don't know what composites of frames to include as navigation units in their index. Simply put, most search engines have difficulty indexing a frames page. You have to remember, there are several distinct frames the engines must index for each page.
There are also accessibilty issues that come into play with regard to screen readers.
Don't try to fool the search engines.
This is probably the biggest trap people fall into. People come up with ways to 'fool' search engines, and they work for little while ...sometimes.
But then the search engines catch on and write routines that penalize sites that use this practice. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: repeating keywords over and over; using invisible text (white text on white background); using very small text to jam the keywords in a small area.
Keep the important content near the top of your pages.
The actual text on your web site is very important. Search engines (spiders) read this to determine rankings. Some engines will place a higher rating of importance based on where they find the text in your page.Closer to the top is usually better. But having keywords throughout your page develops a "theme" and that is also important.
Don't stuff the top of your pages with data the engines can't read.
As with the last example, content higher up on your page is taken as being more important than something further down. Therefore, HTML formatting, images, scripts, etc. toward the top of your page can result in lower ratings.
Web Site Content should be your #1 priority.
Your quest for high placement must start with a well constructed web site.
It is important to have sufficient text describing the purpose of the web site using your keywords in the content, but don't repeat them over and over.
Many search engines rate sites based on 'keyword density'.
This is usually a formula that looks at META Keywords, words in your TITLE, words in paragraph text, words in links to other pages, and even words in the “ALT”' text on your images. They will even look at different forms of your keywords. For example, if an important keyword for you is “FISH”, the word “FISHING” in the body of your document will raise the confidence in the word “FISH” on some engines
Keep your web site updated.
Make sure that your site is up to date. No one likes to go to a page that never changes or that is very out of date. Make sure that the data in your page still portrays the message that you want to send. Check that the links on your site are still active. Dead links are not only an inconvenience for the visitor, but can also negatively influence your rankings.
Don't go image or Flash crazy.
We have all seen pages that are almost all images or are created primarily with Flash. While they do convey beauty, remember, the search engines don't have eyes. They don't see the beautifully formatted text in your image or the looping Flash presentation. All they see is 'yourimage.jpg', and 'yourimage.jpg' doesn't go far in terms of content and relevancy.
