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Title Tags The most critically important location to place keywords is within your web pages HTML <title> tag. Search engines view the keywords found in the title tag as extremely important since they tell the engine what your site is about. Therefore, you should place your most important keywords within your <title> tag. You should also avoid waiting valuable space with words like your company name unless it is so well known that people use it as their primary keyword while searching for what you sell. Another mistake that we commonly see is something like welcome to our homepage this is useless because nobody will be searching for that phrase to search for your site. It is hard to overemphasize the importance of content within your <title> tag. Here are some points to remember:
- Your page’s title tag is one of the most important aspects of web page design in respects to scoring well on most search engines. It tells the search engine what your page is about.
- Your title tag is what the search engine uses as a link on the search engine uses as a link on the search results page. It confirms to your potential site visitor that your page is what they searched for. For example, you own a Bed & Breakfast in Hanalei Bay, Hawaii Island of
Kauai called Kiluhana Inn. You should not use Kiluhana Inn as your title tag. If you so, do your business will be handicapped, in search for anything related to Hawaii, or bed & breakfast, or Kauai or Hanalei Bay because none of those words appear in your title. You will more than likely be buried on the rankings by more knowledgeable competition.
A better tag would be: <title> Bed & Breakfast Kauai –Hanalei
Bay Hawaii</title> There are three reasons why this is a better tag:
1. The keywords Hawaii, Beach, Bread & Breakfast, Hanale Bay, Kauai are all keywords in your <title> that people are likely to enter when searching for this type of service.
2. The keywords Hawaii, Beach, Hanalei Bay,
Kauai are all terms that are entered when people are dong research related to your location. For instance, if someone does a keyword search for Hanalei Kauai your service has a good change of showing up near the top of the search results.
3. Engines and directories have been known to give an ever so slight priority to alphabetical order. Although this is a minor consideration, whenever possible we start our web page titles with a letter that begins early in the alphabet. Because of this reason, we favor the title Bed & Breakfast Kauai over
Kauai Bed & Breakfast. You should limit your title tag to less than 60 characters (usually about 7 to 10 words). Anything longer and you risk getting part of your title chopped off by some search engines. In the example above, it would be best to place Kiluhana Inn at the end of the title tag only if it fits within the 60 character limit and there are not any better keywords to use in its place. You should also avoid using what are called stop words or dead weight words in your title tags. These are words that have become so common that search engines either ignore them or return hardly relevant results whenever they are entered into the search. Examples include homepage or homepage, WWW, web and web page. These words are rarely necessary information to your titles. Other stop words you should minimize using in your title are the, of, that, is, and, to and so forth. These words have no meaning in a search and they waste valuable character space. However, keep in mind that these words so add to your title’s readability. So if you can write a title with minimal stop words that still makes sense and is full of keywords then you have the perfect title. But don’t risk a messy or unreadable title just because you want to stuff it with keywords. Remember, you may get your title to the top of the search result, but someone still has to read it and find it interesting before it does any good.
Header Tags After your title, your web page’s header tags are the next most important placement of your keywords. Header tags are specified with the following HTML code: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>,<h4>, <h5>,<h6>. Generally speaking, an <h1> tag is considered more important than an <h2> tag which is more important thane an <h3> tag and so on. Since your header tags will become the headlines on your web page, it is important that they look natural and appeal to customer who visit your site. A good example of rich header tags would be something like: <h1>Your San Diego Real Estate Research<h1> <h2>For Buying San Diego real estate and selling real estate in
San Diego, we’re your one stop source.<h2> <follow this with keyword-rich body text> Body TextYour page’s >body> text refers to the visible text on your page. While it is very important to place your keywords I page titles and headlines, it is also beneficial to feature your keywords throughout the rest of your page. Generally, web pages should have about 200-300 words of text with special emphasis on two to three carefully chosen keywords. Within those keyword rich <body> text, search engines respond favorably to keywords placed within style tags such as <b>, <strong>, <i>, <em>, and <li>. <p>the <b>San Diego Real Estate Resource</b> is your source of information and services for anyone buying or selling <b>real estate</b> in <b>
San Diego</b>. We specialize in <b>
San Diego real estate</b>and are committed to providing the expertise, professionalism and superior customer service today’s market demands. </p> Link Anchor Text
Link anchor text refers to the visible text in an HTML link. For instance, in the following link: Free Trial Keyword Research Tool The anchor text is Free Trial Keyword Search Tool. The actual HTML code for the link looks like:
<a href=http://www.wordtracker.com/trial.html>Free Trial Keyword Research Tool</a>
Keywords placed in the anchor text of links on your web pages are given a higher priority by most search engines. Whenever possible, you should work this fact to your advantage. When other site link to you with your keywords in the anchor text of their links that is even better. Therefore, try to influence which keywords are being used in the link anchor text of other sites that point traffic in your direction. This may be the single most effective strategy for boosting your page’s ranking. The Higher Up on the Page, the Better
It is very important that you place some of your best keyword-rich text as high up on your web page as you can. That’s because search engines index page content (via the utilization of source code) In linear order and give priority to keywords found closest to the to[ of your web page. This means that you should place your keywords in your first headline and in the first paragraph on your page, and limit the images, JavaScript, and other HTML code that precedes your keyword text.
Combining HTML Tags We know that text inside <h1> and <b> tags are given more weight by search engines. We also know that link anchor text is also given more weight. It follows that is can be beneficial to combine them, when formatting allows. Example: <h1><b><a href=’mypage.html’>Cell Phones<a/a<b></h1> Whenever the layout of the page allows, we will replace a sentence or two of text containing the primary keywords near the top of the page in an <h1> tag and then bold the keywords that we want to emphasize and make them links.
Cascading style sheets
(CSS) can be used to alter the standard appearance of any tag. In such cases <h1> tags do not have to make text unusually large, <b> tags do not necessarily make text bold, and links can even be made to look like links. It all depends on whatever style you have assigned the tags within your web page’s associated style sheet.css file. You can also use absolute positioning in CSS to arrange your keyword-rich copy so that it appears at the begging of the HTML source code regardless of where it actually appears on the visible portion of the webpage.
Be careful using CSS absolute positioning as it might also cause your page to look very strange if the site visitor uses their browser to resize the fonts for better readability. Be sure to test the look with different browser font size settings to ensure an acceptable design layout.
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nice site
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Thanks for the nice article. This is exactly I was looking for - Difference between link and title tags explained. Thanks. Hiren
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