Proper Title Tags
Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword for the page, followed by a brief description of the page content. It will be less than 65 characters and avoid using stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc. Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas.
Check your title tags on all your pages.  This is located at the top of your HTML code surrounded by <title></title>

Proper Description Tags
Good description tags contain information about the page’s content and persuade search engine users to visit your web site. They should be between 25 and 35 words in length.
Make sure each page has a unique meta description tags  This are also found near the top of the HTML code surrounded by <meta></meta>.  This is not a fix all solution but it defiantly  helps.

Proper Keywords Tags
Your keywords meta tag should contain between 5-10 keywords or keyword phrases that are also found in page content.
Make sure each page has unique meta keywords. This are also found near the top of the HTML code surrounded by <meta></meta>.  You can reuse some keywords but make sure that each keyword is relevant to that page.  If you are using WordPress, install and use Greg’s High Performance SEO plugin which will allow you to update the meta tags on each individual page.

Proper Heading Tags
Each page of your site should use at least the H1 heading tag for the search engines that examine it when crawling your site.  Organize your site into a hierarchy by utilizing the <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> etc… tags.  This not only helps the search engine bots, but it also helps your users visually navigate trough the site.
Page Content
Pages should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive content that contains the keywords specified for the page.
Websites should be informative but not overly wordy.  Also do your best to make sure that all content is relevant and useful to the user.  You want to avoid all fluffy talk.  The majority of the time you should take what you have written and reduce it in half.  This makes it easier for the user to get the info they need and they don’t feel like they have used as much time.

Proper Navigation
Each page of your site should contain links to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is a critical step for the proper indexing and page rank distribution of your site.
One solution is to make sure you have a site map link in your footer and/or a search bar in your header or side bar.  Make sure each link is properly labeled both in the code and visibly so that both the bot and the user are able to navigate efficiently.  Consider putting titles on all of your links in the code. Periodically have people test the navigation of your site and gather feedback.  You use your site more often than the normal user, to you it may seem a simple navigation but to the new user, it may be a maze.  Use the feedback you gather to help you determine where any bottlenecks are in your site or where people are getting stuck or leaving.  Many analytic services also provide you valuable information on which page within your site users leave.  Analyze this data to also discover patterns and then look for solutions to help users stay on your site until you have a conversion.

Proper Sitemap
It’s important to use two site maps for your website–an XML version and a static version. The XML version can be created with Search Engine Visibility’s site map tool. The static version should sit on a static HTML page and contain links to every other page. If you are using WordPress, install and use  Sitemap XML plugin to assist you if you are unsure how to use and submit a Sitemap

Controlled Crawling
It’s important that search engine spiders find your robots.txt file that guides spiders to pages and directories you want crawled and denies entry to protected areas of your site. If you are using WordPress, install and use  Sitemap XML plugin to assist you.

Duplicate Content/Tags
Because search engines treat web sites as a grouping of pages and not a single entity, each page on your site should be unique so that the tags and content differ between each page. Doing so increases the number of pages that will rank.

Word Density
Pages should contain 300 to 700 words of unique and descriptive content. A page’s meta tag keywords should also be those that occur most frequently on the page.

SEO – Search Enginge Optimization

This is adapted from a seminar on SEO by Kelly Horner from OpenBook by Yellowstone Hotel Systems.

For those who want to find out a little more about SEO and how to improve their websites in the code and in the content.

Websites are typically built to be seen, but how do people find websites? Even before the internet was established as we know it today, people knew that there had to be a way to index information so it was searchable. From the early beginings to Archie, to Excite, to Yahoo!, to Ask, to Google there are so many ways to search. People who use the internet typically use search engines to help them find what they need. We have seen a lot of improvement over the years and the compitition has helped spur many of these advancements. Search engines use Bots to search the web and to collect information about websites for their database. These bots find new sites and update information from old sites. To have a bot search your site, you may submit it to a search engine (which may cost a fee). As far as I am aware, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are the larger search enginges. They offer Url submisions for free. Here is how to submit your site:

• One way to add your site to Google is to add your url.
• For Yahoo! it is similar
• For Yahoo! it is also similar
• There are also several websites out there that make money by helping you submit yoursite to 20+ search engings because not everyone uses only the three mentioned above.

Once your site has been “crawled” by a search engine bot, you are competing against every other website that is similar to yours. In the begining search engine bots returned the sites in the order they found them. They then advanced into ranking them. Now search engines use advanced complicated algorithms that are constantly changing to help make your search relevant.

The more your site is relevant to the users search, the more likely they are to see you site. The more the search engine knows about your site the easier it is for them to determine if your site is relative or not. One way to help the bots know more about your site is through meta tags. According to w3schools.com

• “Metadata is information about data.
• The <meta> tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable.
• Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata.
• The <meta> tag always goes inside the head element.
• The metadata can be used by browsers (how to display content or reload page), search engines (keywords), or other web services.”

Meta data goes into the <head> element of your page. Here we can put additional information about our site to help the bots. Two major items we want to list here to help our site is the description and keywords.

<head>
<meta name="description" content="My CIT230 website" />
<meta name="keywords" content="CIT230,BYUI,assignments" />
</head>

Search engine bots also check our titles (that apear in the browser’s title bar), Headers (begining with <h1> working down), our links out of the site, links into the site, content, how often our content is updated and a lot more. From the Seminar Sister Horner mentioned that our title needs to be less than 66 characters including spaces for Google but Yahoo! and Bing let you have 120 characters. She mentioned that our page description should be no more than 250 characters but only 160 characters are displayed on google search results so make the first 160 characters really count. Her suggestion was to structure your description like this “verb, then target keyword and then brand”. For example, “Reserve a room at one of the finest Island Park hotels, VictorianInns Resort”.

She also talked about the imporatance of Keywords. One good tool to use in choosing keywords is the Google Keyword tool. She said to use about 5 keywords and no more than 10. Some of these may include misspellings and abbreviations. Focus on these words throughout the text. Use them appropriatly in the header tags. We also need to use the keywords meaningfully inside the content. Content should be atleast 250 words per page and user friendly. Another tip she mentioned is to keep our code (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) clean, have an HTML and XML sitemap, and not to go deeper than 2 levels in directories.

I am not a master yet at search engine optimization, but I hope that as my site grows, it will gain position in the organic searches.

If you have any questions, corrections, or suggestions please email us or leave a comment below.

Advertising

Once your site is ready you need to register it with Google.

You are now ready to begin creating ads. Here are a few places to begin. Your target market will help determine where to place your ads.

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Facebook

Google

Google is has a very large share of the market when it comes to online advertising. For only $5 you can get started with Google Adwords. Google Adwords is easy to set up. If you already have a gmail account, simply sign up with your gmail user name and password. If you don’t use gmail, you can create a gmail account for free.

Once in Adwords, you can begin creating ads. Your Ad will look similar to the sample ad in the image above. Ads are limited to the amount of characters. You want to use each character wisely.

Your Title Goes Here
You Want Keywords Here that
Relate to what They Search
www.YourWebsite.com
You want to use key words that are similar to what they are looking for. In the last learning report we discussed a little about keywords in choosing your domain name. Another tip is to make your ad stand out from the others on the page. One thing is to Capitalize Every Major Word. You don’t need to capitalize articles like ‘a’ and ‘the’. Also try using more specific phrases that will relate more to what they are searching for.

Once you have your ad written, you need to determine which keywords you want to use to trigger you account. You will determine how much you are willing to bid to compete against others who are targeting the same adgroups you are. This is part of determining what rank your ad will be placed on the side of Google searches and how often they will be displayed. You also set a daily limit so you don’t spend more than you plan.

Once your ad and keywords are ready you can monitor your progress, if you already register with Google Analytics you can register your adwords inside your analytics account to link them and read what people are doing when they come to your site. You can also set goals and track conversions to see how much costs you are spending for a conversion or things that bring you money. The main thing with Google Adwords is to experiment it is not an exact science, there is no set answer to solve all your questions, but as you test things, you can find methods that suit your business.

Facebook

If you are looking to target specific groups, Facebook has a lot of information about its users already and allows you to select your target market. Facebook is typically good for targeting younger age groups, many users are college age. Facebook is different from Google adwords because instead of using Keywords to target your market you select from fields like age, gender, school, city, likes, hobbies, and more.

Your ad writing is similar to Google adwords but you put a picture in. Simply upload your logo or other file that will help promote your business. Follow the same guidelines for writing an ad.

Twitter and Linkedin

Twitter and Linkedin are very good ways for you to connect with existing customers, potential customers, partners, potential partners and more. For the very reasonably low price of $0.00 you have the opportunity to connect with other people and make connections.

If you have any questions please email us or leave a comment below.

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