Improving Website Search Engine Placement

You can control the text on your web pages, which is a major factor in determining relevance. There are three main areas of a web page that need to be considered for appropriate text: the title tag, meta tags, and the actual page content.

Title tags - The title tag is the copy that defines the title of the browser window that displays the page. Whenever you look at a web page, the very top bar of the browser (the bar where you would click to open or close the window) displays the page's title. The title tag is often overlooked because it doesn't display on the page itself, but rather in the top bar. For this reason, some sites forget to put any content in their title tags. But as you can imagine, the title of a page is weighted fairly heavily in terms of relevance. Placing appropriate keywords or phrases in your title tags can help improve search engine placement.

Meta tags - Meta tags are special tags that allow you to add keywords and descriptions to a page that do not get displayed directly to a visitor. Again, because they are not visible, they are often overlooked when producing a web site. You can check to see if you have meta tags by viewing the source on your web page. They tags will look something like this...

<META name="description" content="Newfangled is a company...">

<META name="keywords" content="CMS, web design, developers, website, newfangled,>

Because these tags do not display on a site, it is easy for some sites to "spam" their meta tags. In other words they might put their keywords in the meta tags one hundred times in an attempt to increase their relevance. Or they might use popular words that do not have anything to do with their site. Because of this some search engines ignore meta tags altogether. However, for the search engines that do consider meta tags, they can provide another opportunity to increase the relevance of your site in the search results. A good rule of thumb for meta tags is to be conservative and strategic in terms of the number if keywords you add. There is no physical limit, but the more words you add, the less each one is weighted. The more you add, the more they "water down" the effectiveness of all of the keywords. The description meta tag should be about 25 words long and simply state a general description of the page.

Website copy - The most important keywords on your site are the words on the page itself, your site's content. While we wouldn't recommend writing the copy on your site for the purposes of getting a better position in a search engine, you might consider using a few less pronouns in cases where their use is not necessary. For example, we might write, "Newfangled Web Factory uses grayscreen prototyping and the NewfangledCMS," instead of, "we use grayscreen prototyping and a CMS," as long as it doesn't make the copy too redundant or awkward. While good writing and appropriate grammar should always determine the style of your copy, keeping in mind how search engines work can help improve your positioning.

Placing the appropriate information in each of the areas of your web pages will help you achieve better relevancy in search engine results. Unfortunately, even with all of the appropriate keywords in the right places, there are still other factors that determine relevancy. Many of these factors are out of your control. For example, some search engines will look at how many other sites link to yours as a factor in determining relevancy. The more sites that link to you, the more "popular" your site is considered, and therefore its relevancy is increased. While requesting links on other sites is always a good idea, but you cannot control whether or not another site will link to you.

There are other factors in relevancy such as how frequently site content changes, how far down the page a keyword is found, and others. Keeping track of how each search engine works can be a monumental task. This is why we generally recommend simply making sure that your site includes all the appropriate elements and that you register it with all the search engines. Becoming more aggressive with placement requires the help of a search engine optimization specialist.   next >