Search Engine Magic Sheet V6
A print-out-and-keep guide to general search engine optimization.
It's been well over a year since I released the last version of the search engine magic sheet. In fact, there's probably some new readers here who missed the earlier versions: http://www.rookieclass.com/archives/03.01.01/page2.html I thought it was worth reworking this page to include any changes that have happened since version 5. If there's one thing about the web - it's always changing.
This is something that I use for my own notes when I'm building my free sites and I want them to do well in ALL of the Search Engines. I know, no mean feat, but let's take a look at what we can do to get our sites and pages ranked as well as possible.
Before starting:
Use Overture's tool to pick some relevant phrases:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Pick one main phrase per page.
Be focused - and totally specific to the niche you're promoting.
Many SE campaigns are a failure because non-relevant keyphrases are chosen.
Title Tag
Format:
<TITLE>Some words here</TITLE>
About the most important part of the page.
Use between 3 to 12 Words - both will get good results on different SEs.
The Title MUST be attractive to the HUMAN viewer as well as the SE spider. Remember that people will see this in the SE listings and you'll get more clicks if it's also appealing to surfers.
Add your most important keywords towards the start of this tag.
Experiment with different lengths of title tag.
Example one (using only the phrase a the title):
<TITLE>anal sex photos</TITLE>
Example two (mixing in other words & spreading the keywords from the main phrase out):
<TITLE>An anal porn site with sex links, movies, and butt fuck photos.</TITLE>
Description META Tag
Format:
<META name="description" CONTENT="Description of your site's content here.">
Use 1 - 3 sentences.
Make it appealing to the surfer - they will see it in the results returned after searching at some SEs.
Include the main phrase.
Repetition WILL help in some engines.
Experiment with 1, 2 and 3 repetitions.
Experiment with different lengths of description tag.
Keyword META Tag
Format:
<META name="keywords" CONTENT="keyword, key phrase, key phrase">
Use ALL the words from the title
Separate with a comma and a space ", "
Use single words or two, three or four word phrases.
Short keyword tags can work REALLY well.
The keywords and description tags are far less important than they used to be.
General notes on the title, keywords, and description tags:
Your main keyphrase must be included in all of these tags.
Re-read every word in those tags and ask "are they REALLY relevant to my content?"
Use only full stops and commas in the Title and Description as punctuation.
The order of tags in the HEAD section should be: 1st) Title 2nd) Description 3rd) Keywords.
In any of the above 3 tags don't repeat any word - use variations.
Remove all carriage returns.
Remove all unnecessary tags / editor generated junk from the head section.
Body text
Format:
Any text which appears within the <BODY> and </BODY> tags.
The body text is absolutely essential and extremely important.
Use an <H1> tag with your keyphrase in it.
Use 25 - 75 words in the body text, incorporating ALL keywords.
Put special effort into getting a nice juicy paragraph of text early on in the page.
Keywords and phrases should appear early on in the page.
Use image ALT text - have a relevant phrase as each ALT text.
Name images something relevant: key-phrase.jpg. (Not important but could help).
Use link TITLE tags:
<A HREF="somepage.html" TITLE="Key phrase here">Some link</A>
Have your keyphrase as a link <A HREF="keyword.html">key phrase here</A>
Look out for over repetition - especially on shorter pages. Less is often more.
No tiny text -2 in size.
No dark text or text that's the same color as the background (invisible).
General Notes:
Work on your link popularity & research into PageRank with Google. (Neither are essential but do look into them.
Use a text editor if you are serious about getting search engine traffic. They make the best code.
Use Good grammar and well-written text - not just a list of keyphrases.
Run all text through a spellchecker.
Start at the top of the page when you're optimizing it - and work down
It's often far better with Google.com to make a page listing all your pages you'd like adding and letting google 'crawl' to your other pages from that one.
Run the page through an HTML validator.
Hope you've enjoyed this. Print it out and give it a try...
TOM ^"^
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