Preparing your pages for the search engines
Before you submit your pages to the search engines, it is crucial that you make sure they are search-engine friendly. Here are some basic tips on what to do.
Make sure your site is useful!
I’m always amazed by how many people miss this simple concept. They spend a huge amount of time trying to get good search engine rankings and lots of visitors, and then what do the visitors find? A poorly designed, badly written website.
It isn’t how many ‘hits’ you get, but how many ’sales’ you make.
Making your pages “people-friendly” is as important as making them “search-engine” friendly. It’s usually much easier to double the effectiveness of your website than it is to double your traffic, and the bottom line result is the same.
Determine your Key Phrases
People get obsessive about their keywords. This is wrong. It is difficult if not impossible to get high rankings based on keywords. Instead, you need to think about keyphrases.
The easiest way to do this is ask yourself “what would someone trying to find me type in when they search?” Make a list of these. Try them out on the search engines — pretend to be someone looking for your product or service.
If your business is geographically restricted, then your keyphrases should reflect this. For example, if you are a a real-estate broker in Pahang, Malaysia, then the key phrase “buying real estate” is a waste of time; instead, the more specific phrase “buying real estate in Pahang Malaysia” is what you want to be thinking about.
Think about variations on the key phrases and write them down. Continuing with our example:
- real estate in Pahang Malaysia
- buying real estate in Pahang Malaysia
- selling real estate in Pahang Malaysia etc.
Crafting your <TITLE> tag
Most people make the mistake of using a page title that’s good for people but lousy for the search engines. Big mistake. A title like “Raju - Real Estate Broker” is a disaster! The golden rule is this: All your most important keyphrases should be in the TITLE tag. So what you do is look at your keyphrases, make a list of all the important words, and create a title tag that uses them. Also, keep in mind that browsers only display the first few words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So while the first sentence of your title tag should be “human readable”, the rest can be just a list of keyphrases. Keep the title between 15 and 20 words. But you might want to try longer title tags on some of your pages. It might have a title that looks like this:
<TITLE>Real Estate in Pahang, Malaysia- Buying Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Office</TITLE>
The reason for this is that the three most important places to have keyphrases and phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You want them to all contain the same important words; this increases your keyphrase density and improves your rankings.
The Meta Tags
The fabled Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed.
Meta tags go in the <HEAD> section of the HTML page (the same section as the <TITLE> tag). The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web-page. In many search engines, your search results will simply be your title tag followed by your meta description tag, so make sure they work together to explain what’s on the page. The format of a Meta description tag is simple. It looks like this:
<META name=”description” content=”Real Estate inPahang, Malaysia - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments, Commercial Property and Office Space”>
My advice on the length of this description is keep it between 100 and 200 characters. Remember: the description tag should be written for humans to read. It should not be a list of keywords, and should be longer (perhaps 50% longer) than your title tag.
The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your keyphrases, and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don’t repeat a keyphrase, and don’t repeat any individual word more than 5 times or so. This may mean that you can’t use some of your better keyphrases.
The reason why you don’t want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. Search engines aren’t as sensitive to keyword repeating as they used to be (most of them ignore extra repeats), but play it safe. The exception is common “noise” words like “the”, “in”, “a”, “and” and so on. Most search engines ignore them. Leave them in, but don’t worry if you have more than 5 of any of them.
If you’ve got a lot of keyphrases that really are relevant to your site, the best thing to do is build “theme” pages devoted to a particular keyphrase or set of keyphrases. This is good for you, good for your visitors, and appreciated by the search engines. Use the most important keyphrases on your homepage.
Use commas as appropriate, but don’t waste a character putting a space after the comma and capitalize words as you might expect people to normally use them. Most search engines will ignore the capitalization.
In addition, some search engines are sensitive to word order, others just to presence of the keywords on the page. So for some search engines, “buying real estate” is not the same as “real estate buying”. This means it is a good idea to word your phrases in the way you think most people are going to type them in.
Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200-400 characters. Unfortunately, this means you may not be able to include all of your key phrases in your meta keywords tag even if you don’t repeat a word too often. The theme pages concept deals with this also. After pruning away, our sample keywords tag might look like this:
<META name=”keywords” content=”real estate in Pahang Malaysia,buying real estate in Pahang Malaysia,selling real estate in Pahang Malaysia,renting real estate in Pahang Malaysia,real estate broker in Pahang Malaysia,house broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental”>
The first paragraph
The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon everything in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your visitors, so you want to make a good impression.
Try to put this first paragraph as close to the <BODY> tag as possible. Avoid putting graphics or other HTML in front of your first paragraph as much as you can. I don’t have a banner ad on my homepage for this reason. Also, use the <H1> or <H2> tag to emphasize your opening sentence (but make sure it looks tasteful!). Example:
<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Pahang Malaysia?</H2><BR>
If so, you’ve come to the right place. My name is Raju, I’m specialize in helping my clients find the perfect home, apartment or commercial space in Pahang Malaysia…
Don’t Go Overboard - and whatever you do, don’t put up spam pages!
You clearly want to have your important keyphrases on your page more than once, because this is what gives the search engines a clue as to what your page is really about. But you don’t want your keyphrases to appear too many times, because that might make the search engines think your page is a spam page trying to rank highly for a particular phrase.
The question then becomes, how much is too much? And the answer is, nobody knows for sure, and it’s going to be different from search engine to search engine. Rumor has it that Google likes pages with less than 13 repeats of a keyphrase, for example.
My advice is to try and keep the number of repeats of important phrases down to 10 or less; this means all instances, in title, meta tags, and the text of the page. Sometimes this simply isn’t possible, because the phrase is so integral to your topic, so don’t get paranoid about this. Just keep it in mind.
Extra Credit!
Now you’ve got a decent webpage, with good content and meta tags. You’re ready to submit to the search engines. Or are you?
What you’ve done so far are the basics. There’s a lot more you can do, time and money permitting, to improve your odds of ranking highly. I’ll discuss that more in future post.
Till then cheers..
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