Implementing Search Engine Optimization

Now that I've determined my subject and translated it I need to implement it on my site. There are a few places to use this phrase to optimize the content. I'll be using the NewfangledCMS to place the phrase in these areas, but while our CMS is designed to make SEO really easy to implement, there's nothing magical about the tool itself. You can follow the same practices with most good content management tools, or hand code it for any web page.

The actual visible title of the page should ideally use this strategic phrase. But sometimes the strategic phrase is not a good choice editorially, so feel free to alter it. In this case the phrase

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"how to determine the best keywords for a web page" is too long for my visible page title, so I'm making the editorial decision to truncate it for the visible page title. I'll use "Determining Web Page Keywords" instead. Our CMS is designed to always uses "H1" tags for these visible page titles. If you're hard coding your page or using a different system, make sure this convention is followed. "H1" is HTML code that indicates that the content is the topmost heading. That's one facet of page information search engines take into consideration. If your content management system doesn't use H1 tags for page titles, don't sweat it. Remember, it's the words themselves that are of utmost importance, not the HTML code.

The second area to implement this phrase is in the "browser title." That's the content that shows up at the very top of the browser above the File menus and tools. This is the phrase that is listed in the search engine results. It's also the phrase that would be used if someone were to bookmark the page. Most content management systems will provide a place to control the browser title. Ours is under the "meta data" tab. Here I will copy and paste my phrase just as I formulated it. You can also place your target words and phrases in the keywords and description fields. But because this content doesn't visibly show up on the page, people have been known to stuff them full of irrelevant phrases in hopes of tilting search traffic their way. As a result search engines pretty much ignore these fields. I usually just repeat my same phrase in these fields just in case they use it in some minimal way, but leaving them blank is fine too.

The NewfangledCMS gives me the ability to control the URLs for each page. Some content management systems use generic ID numbers to build the URLs for each page. In fact, if I don't indicate a specific page URL here, ours will use a database record ID too.

A friendly, editorially relevant URL is helpful and is a minor factor in search engine ranking, but it's not that big of a deal, remember--it's the words on the page that are most important. When using a feature like this you'll have to make sure that every page on your site has a unique file name--you can't use the same URL refer to two different pages.

I'll use the same phrase as I've targeted for my browser title. Our system converts the phrase to all lower case and adds dashes or underscores between words. You can't add any special characters in a page's file name--no apostrophes, ampersands, or asterisks.