The title will appear at the top of the user's browser window, and the description is often quoted by search engines, so these should be coherent and concise -- the title should be six to 12 words, according to Bruce Clay, a leading SEO consultant, and the description 12 to 24 words. Your title and description should reinforce each other and the page's visible content. If you have a lot of keywords, choose judiciously, because search engines prize natural-sounding language. You can load all your keywords, even misspelled variants, into the keywords tag field.
In the visible content. Your keywords should appear frequently in the text, as well as in the other elements of a page, including the descriptive "alt" tags that underlie images and in the headlines and subheads atop a section of text. Though there is no agreement among optimizers about how much text a page should include or how frequently keywords should be mentioned, they do agree on this: If people find your copy thoughtful and worth reading, a search engine will, too. Never stuff a page so full of keywords that it doesn't read naturally.
3. Building a Better Website
How your site is organized, designed, and built will affect its search-engine ranking, according to Andy Robson, managing director of the optimizing firm dzine it. Organize content into themed categories, what Clay calls silos. "By lining up your content by the way people search, you define to the search engine what you're about," Clay says. You can either group similar pages together into separate directories of folders and subfolders, or you can create "virtual silos" by using links that guide a user from one page to the next.
Other strategies are more technical, so you may need to rely on a Web developer for assistance. The site must be hosted on a fast server. The page code should be free of bugs and fully comply with the standards for website structure set by the World Wide Web Consortium. (You can test this at validator.w3.org.) Include in the site's code a special protocol known as Sitemap, which makes it easier for visiting search engines to scan the site. Sitemaps can be submitted directly to the search engines.
Seeding Links
Once you have optimized your website, you want to attract links from other sites. SEO consultants offer a fairly prosaic strategy: Build a good site with useful content to which other sites will want to send their readers. Here are a few strategies to grease that wheel.
Lend your expertise. Forge partnerships under which other sites can publish your repurposed or original content on the condition that they link back to your site. "Sharing your expertise about the product or the service can differentiate your brand," says Stephen Woessner. "The brand story is what gets somebody to purchase one product over another."
Find out who's linking to your competition. Many of them probably should be linking to you as well. The "links" tool at faganfinder.com/urlinfo reports the inbound links to a website detected by the major search engines. Many of those links will come from directories that are important to your industry or community. There's no sin in requesting a link -- or in trading content for one.
Be choosy about linkers. "You want the best sites, not the most, to link to you," says Bruce Clay. "If an expert links to you, by association you're an expert" (provided the expert is in your subject area). By the same token, avoid link farms, or websites that exist solely to provide outbound links, and services that sell links outright. Search engines, says Clay, will penalize you for the chicanery.
SEO Subterfuge
The techniques we have talked about here are often described as ethical, organic, or natural SEO. By contrast, black hat SEO embraces manipulative or deceptive techniques to game the search-engine system. Search engines work hard to keep these techniques from working, so they are seldom effective for long and could even get you blacklisted. Here are several strategies that you are best off avoiding.
Cloaking: Presenting two different versions of the same page, one to search engines and one to users.
Keyword stuffing, or spamming: Loading up the meta tags with popular search terms that have no substantive connection with the page.
Hidden links and keywords: Concealing them in the background color, outside the visible margins, or in other code.
Resources
Nobody knows what Google wants better than Google -- visit its pages for webmasters at google.com/support/webmasters.
Consultant Bruce Clay's site, at bruceclay.com, wins a high ranking for its free and helpful information.
SEOmoz.org sells SEO tools but offers stripped-down versions and tutorials for free.
There are free sites about search-engine marketing at searchenginewatch.com, searchengineland.com, and searchengineguide.com.
