Sunday, December 9, 2007

STEPS TO OPTIMIZING YOUR HTML CODES

STEPS TO OPTIMIZING YOUR HTML CODES

by Shelley Lowery

Your key to success in online marketing and promotion is your web

site. From your title, keywords, meta tags, and text, to your over all

site design, each plays a very important role when optimizing your

site. If your site doesn't rank in the top 10 or 20 when doing a keyword

search at the top search engines, your target audience won't be able

to find you.

About 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from the eight major

search engines. Most people will go to a search engine, type in a

keyword or keyword phrase and look through the top 10 - 20 results.

Most of the time they'll find what they're looking for in the first 10

results. The percentage of click throughs are even smaller. Listing

near the top and grabbing the attention of your target audience is the

top priority. There are many components of your web page that you

should pay close attention to when preparing it for listing in a search

engine.

The first step towards improving your listing is selecting the best

keywords and keyword phrases that best reflect your web page.

Keywords are the foundation of your web presence in the search

engines.

* Keywords

To help you choose effective keywords and keyword phrases, there

are two important steps. First of all, get a Thesaurus and investigate

synonyms for your original keywords. Write these words down on a

sheet of paper. Next, perform your keyword and keyword phrases

search at the major engines.

Pay close attention to the web sites that rank 1 through 10. View the

source code of these pages. Pay close attention to their placement of

keywords in the , and tags. Next, do a

search for your competitor's web sites and view their HTML source

code. Noticing patterns is your key to ranking above them.

* Tags

An image alt tag follows your graphic address or url in your html code.

These words will be displayed in place of your graphics through an

older browser or when your visitors have their graphics turned off. To

fully optimize your graphics, insert several of your keywords in the alt

tags of the graphics located at the top of your pages.

Example:

grooming,pet care,dog groomers" BORDER="0">

Tags

tag is the first thing that a user sees when your site is

returned by a search query. You only have a split second to grab your

targets attention. Place keywords that are most pertinent to your

business in the title tag.

Effective title tags include only relevant keyword or keyword phrases.

Avoid non-indexing filler words, such as a, an, the, welcome and

home page.

Example:

Dog Groomers Salon: Professional Dog Grooming Tips, Pet

Care and moreThe * .

* tags

tags are HTML code that enable the search engines to

determine what keywords are relevant to this specific site.

The META "description" tag will contain a description of your site.

Make sure your description contains some of your relevant keywords.

The META "keywords" tag will contain a listing of your keywords and

keyword phrases that are relevant to your site and enable a search

engine to find you.

Example:

Top Professional Pet Groomers">

animal groomers, Dog Grooming, Pet Care, Animal Groomers, DOG

GROOMING, PET CARE, ANIMAL GROOMERS">

* Text

Not only are the html tags an important part of optimization, but it is

almost just as important to add plenty of text to your pages. Your text

should contain each of your keywords used in different variations. I.E.

If your keywords are free, promotion, marketing, advertising, Your text

might say something like this; Promotion, Marketing and Advertising

are the key to your success. We offer many promotional resources,

including; Free marketing articles, classified advertising and free

promotion.

Optimization will be your solution to winning the search engine wars.

Shelley Lowery is the Webmistress of Web Source - Your Guide to

Professional Website Design and Development. Join The Syndicator,

our new, free article syndication program and display complete

articles w/photographs on your website that are automatically updated

each week. http://www.web-source.net

This Report may be Distributed in any way and even resold, as long

as all information, including bylines above and physical URL's are left

intact and article remains unchanged.

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