Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines

Most of the top search engines and crawlers will find your site without your having to submit it. They will find and index any page on a site that is designed properly to achieve top ranking. So you want to make sure that your site is search engine optimized. This article gives you some of the basics of Search Engine Optimization..

1. Page Title
The crawlers always look first at the Title Tag or the text that displays in the reverse bar of the browser when it lands on a page. The title is also used to describe your page when someone adds it to their Favorites or Bookmarks lists. So you want to make sure it relates to what you do or how you want people to remember your business. You need unique text describing the unique subject matter of each page since the different pages deal with different material on your site (10 to 15 words, 80 characters maximum).

2. Page Description

Some search engines and crawlers support the meta description tag and look at the text, generally, 200 to 250 characters to index it, although only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed. Remember that search engines can change how they treat meta tags at any given time. Google, for example, typically ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page based on content from the page that best matches the user query. If your meta description is the best match for the user query, Google may show that in its results. Other search engines may support the meta description tag partially.

3. Keywords
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. Not all of the crawlers support this tag which just reinforces the information in the body copy. Remember, if you don’t use the specific words on the page, then just adding them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page rank. The meta keyword tag is also sometimes used as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself.