Steps
to Optimizing Your HTML Codes
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> Design > Articles
by Shelley
Lowery
Your key to success in online marketing and
promotion is your web site. From your title, keywords, meta
tags, and text, to your over all site design, each plays a
very important role when optimizing your site. If your site
doesn't rank in the top 10 or 20 when doing a keyword search
at the top search engines, your target audience won't be able
to find you.
About 80 percent of all web site traffic originates
from the eight major search engines. Most people will go to
a search engine, type in a keyword or keyword phrase and look
through the top 10 - 20 results. Most of the time they'll
find what they're looking for in the first 10 results. The
percentage of click throughs are even smaller.
Listing near the top and grabbing the attention
of your target audience is the top priority. There are many
components of your web page that you should pay close attention
to when preparing it for listing in a search engine.
The first step towards improving your listing
is selecting the best keywords and keyword phrases that best
reflect your web page. Keywords are the foundation of your
web presence in the search engines.
Choosing Effective Keywords
To help you choose effective keywords and keyword phrases,
there are two important steps. First of all, get a Thesaurus
and investigate synonyms for your original keywords. Write
these words down on a sheet of paper. Next, perform your keyword
and keyword phrases search at the major engines.
Pay close attention to the web sites that rank
1 through 10. View the source code of these pages. Pay close
attention to their placement of keywords in the
,
and tags. Next, do a search for your competitor's web
sites and view their HTML source code. Noticing patterns is
your key to ranking above them.
Optimizing Your Graphics Using the Alt tag
An image alt tag follows your graphic address or url in your
html code. These words will be displayed in place of your
graphics through an older browser or when your visitors have
their graphics turned off. To fully optimize your graphics,
insert several of your keywords in the alt tags of the graphics
located at the top of your pages.
Optimizing Your Title Tag
The title tag is the first thing that a user sees when your
site is returned by a search query. You only have a split
second to grab your targets attention. Place keywords that
are most pertinent to your business in the title tag. Effective
title tags include only relevant keyword or keyword phrases.
Avoid non- indexing filler words, such as a, an, the, welcome
and home page. Example:
Web-Source.net Webmasters resource directory. Free
Webmaster resources - marketing, advertising, promotion, classifieds
.
META tags
META tags are HTML code that enable the search engines to
determine what keywords are relevant to this specific site.
The META keywords tag will contain a listing of your keywords
and keyword phrases that are relevant to your site and enable
a search engine to find you. Example:
Text
Not only are the html tags an important part of optimization,
but it is almost just as important to add plenty of text to
your pages. Your text should contain each of your keywords
used in different variations. For example - If your keywords
are free, promotion, marketing, advertising, Your text might
say something like this; Promotion, Marketing and Advertising
are the key to your success. We offer many promotional resources,
including; Free marketing articles, classified advertising
and free promotion.
Optimization will be your solution to winning
the search engine wars.
