"Yes, but will it fit into my frame?" the customer responds. "Will it match my furniture?"
Websites like art are about being seen. Web developers and designers take pride in making something dazzle and dance with beauty on the computer screen. Yet if it is not optimized it will not be seen. So while developing that state of the art site, keep some of the following optimization guidelines in mind. Getting some optimization done as you develop and design, will help you optimize quickly. There will be less to optimize when your are done with the develop and design.
Content
It's all about the text.
Remember that optimization is all about the text. Search engines are text driven. Optimizing text helps improve search engine results.
Patience and realistic goals will keep the frustrations low. Search engines have to crawl a site to determine what a site is about. This takes time, usually about a month, before crawls and indexing are completed by the various search engine spiders.
Take time to think a lot about the purpose of the website. Write down a lot of stuff in a word processing program even if it sounds silly at first. Then edit what you wrote. Edit some more, get some feedback and then start working on the keywords and keyphrases that identify the unique quality of your website.
Keywords
Keywords used to be easy. Those days are gone. Keywords are highly competitive. Using two-word or three-word, maybe even four-word, phrases makes optimization less frustrating. A keyword phrase (keyphrase) helps identify the uniqueness of a web site.
The keyword "game" will generate about one billion results. The keyphrase "strategy game" will generate about eighteen-million results. That is a difference of approximately one-hundred-million. The keyphrase "pc strategy game" will generate about six-hundred-thousand results. Time will need to be spent finding unique keyphrases but the benefits of narrowing the results, with multi-word phrases, provides a better chance of being noticed.
Title
The contents of the page title will be displayed in the search results by most search engines. For optimization keep the page title to ten words or less. Put the keyword, which is also a keyword in the page content, near the beginning of the page title. For example, if the page content is about PC strategy games then place PC strategy games near the beginning of the page title.
<title>PC strategy games - tips and tricks for winning</title>
URL
Use a major keyword, from the page content, as part of the url.
http://www.yourwebsite.com/pc_strategy_puzzle.html
Density
The density formula is D = WC/KC (D = density; WC = word count; KC = keyword count)
For major keywords target 3-7% density
For major keywords target 3-7% density For minor keywords target 1-2% density
Keyword density measures how relevant keywords are in a page. The formula density = word count divided by keyword count will provide a general idea of the density percentage. For major keywords try to stay between three and seven percent. For minor keywords stay between one and two percent. Try to optimize between five to ten keyword phrases.
Avoid the unethical practice of keyword stuffing. You will be penalized and possibly banned from the search engines which is worse than doing no optimization at all. Keyword stuffing uses various techniques but it is basically stuffing a page and/or meta tag with several occurrences of a keyword or keyphrase.
Density above 7% looks suspicious and may be considered keyword stuffing.
Headings
Use the keywords as headings in your content (<h1>,<h2>,etc.).
<h1>PC Strategy Game Tip #1</h1>
Meta Tags
The meta tags are important although many will disagree. Meta tags have fallen out of favor because these tags used to be the magic solution to optimization. Not anymore. Keywords and content are more beneficial in getting a web site in top rankings. However, meta tags are still very important. Meta tags are a part of the HTML and are used by most search engines to find a description of your web site.
Therefore, no question about it, use the meta tags. Use the meta tag for description and keywords. Place these meta tags below the title tag on your page.
<meta name ="description" content="~" />
<meta name="keywords" content="~" />
The keyword meta tag helps you keep track of the keywords and having these meta tags give a small boost to search engine ranking. While it is true that meta tags do not perform the magic they once did it is better to have the tags than to not have them. Think of meta tags like vitamins. Vitamins are not necessary for being healthy but vitamins due provide a healthy boost.
Keep the content, keywords, title, density, heading and meta tags in mind as you develop and design in order to optimize quickly. The faster you optimize the faster you start appearing on the search results. It is all good for business.
Source by :
Lawrence Roth in an independent web developer who owns and maintains rothline.com. Lawrence has worked on various e-commerce and website projects. Lawrence writes articles and stories to submit to online publications.
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