5 Ways to Promote Your Site - Search Engine Strategies

Perhaps the most important -- and inexpensive -- strategy is to rank high for your
preferred keywords on the main search engines in "organic" or "natural" searches (as
opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content of your
webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing. The
idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what
your webpage is about. This approach is called "search engine optimization," abbreviated
as SEO.

1. Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page -- rich in
keywords you want people to find you with -- using 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler"
words from the title (such as "the," "and," etc.) as possible, while still making it readable.
This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found.
Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of
the webpage between the tags, in this format: . (It also shows on the blue bar
at the top of your web browser.)

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home
page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't
just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc.," use "Silver and Platinum Bullets --
Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear
first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your identity on the
search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words
on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.

2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below
your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two
describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this
page. Don't include keywords that don't appear on the webpage. Place the Description
META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the tags, in this format:

The maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the
first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When you prepare a webpage, write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1
above). Then write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using
each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the
description META tag.

Next, strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and
insert those into the keywords META tag. So to summarize so far, every webpage in your
site should have a distinct title and META description tag. If you implement these two
points, you're well on your way to better search engine ranking. But there's more that will
help your ranking....

3. Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). Search engines consider keywords
that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make
sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags.

4. Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines
expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document --
where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just
artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a
keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should
rank high, so don't overdo it.

5. Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags. This helps your
site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors (www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/) and
gives additional clues to the search engines. The ALT attributes do help get your images
ranked higher for image search.