Oct 19

Marketing your web site - part 2

Tag: Optimization — admin @ 8:00 am

Now let’s talk about the parts you don’t see.

The following components are part of the validation process and are required for search engine optimization:

DOCTYPE
Refers to “document type declaration”. The top of every web page must have one to be W3C compliant. The DOCTYPE informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using. DOCTYPEs are essential for compliant web pages, your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.

meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=
Indicates the type of data sent to the browser. It is used by browsers to know what to do with the data that they receive.

TITLE
To identify the contents of a document. Keep it short and sweet no more than 9 words

meta NAME=”description” content=
Each web page needs a unique Title and Description. Do not duplicate web pages. Use no more than 40 words or 3 sentences.

meta name=”keywords” content=
Unfortunately this meta tag does not have much emphasis anymore. Although I recommend to use it with no more that 10-20 keywords. I use it as a point of reference of what possible keywords are on that page.

Menu system
A menu system can make or break a web site. I prefer CSS based menus because they are text based and can be spidered easily. If you do you do use a graphic based hyperlink menu with rollovers, I suggest to use a text menu system at the bottom of the page so you can still get the same links spidered with text names. It is so important to think about your menu structure before you do anything. Avoid going more than 3 levels and dynamic links are spidered as well.

Tags - H1, H2, H3, Bold, Italic
Use your tags liberally. Enhanced text seems to get a little more emphasis, Especially the H1 tags.

Hyperlinks
Hyperlink your keywords on every page to other pages on your web site. The search engines give you bonus points for doing this.

Alt Tags
If you do use images be sure to fill in the alt tags, although these do not have very much emphasis as they use to due to keyword stuffing by many web developers.

Good luck with your SEO

-=Smitty=-