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HTML PAGE OPTIMIZATIONAll Sites rely on search engines (Google<http://www.google.com/>, AltaVista <http://www.av.com/>,etc.) for pointing visitors to relevant information on your site. From the start, it is important to format your pages so that it will strengthen your search engine positioning and relevance to a search term. It is important to use good practices from the start to avoid the pitfalls of search engine indexing. Going back to correct 100's of pages is not a lot of fun. Important Steps to Formatting your Page Page Title Title: Insert the page title in the <title> tag at the top of each page as the first tag after the opening <html> tag.Make it a descriptive title that identifies your page content. Use as many of your important key words as possible. This is the most important criteria for search engine indexing. It is used by every search engine and appears in the result page. For practical reasons, a unique title is important. If a person gets search results for 20 pages from the site and each one is called "Johns Page" this repetition does not help visitors select the best page for their purpose. Length:60 characters Meta Description Description Meta Tag: This is the second most important element for search engine placement. Try to provide additional information that is not contained in the Title tag. FAST, Northern Light and Google do not support this tag. Length: 150 characters Meta Keywords Keywords Meta Tag: the keywords tag is the lesser used factor for search engines, mainly because during the early days of the Web they were used to stuff irrelevant, but high-demand keywords into a page to raise its ranking. Only DirectHit, AltaVista and Inktomi still use them. It is still important to use the keyword tags on your pages.Length: 1000 characters Warning about Keywords Meta Tag: If you use terms in the keyword meta tag that are not found in the text on your page, it can actually penalize the page's ranking because the search engines can consider this practice spamming. Alt Tags ALT TAGS: Since AltaVista, Go.com, Google and Lycos all index alt text in the image tag. This is a practical way of inserting terms that may not be contained in your page text, but are still relevant. < img src="../images/some_image.gif" alt="Keywords, for, this, page"> Title Tags Title TAGS: Since AltaVista, Go.com, Google and Lycos all index title text in the image tag. This is a practical way of inserting terms that may not be contained in your page text, but are still relevant. < img src="../images/some_image.gif" Title="Keywords, for, this, page"> Headers Use the heading tags: (<h1>, <h2> to provide structure to your text. Search engines (Altavista, Google, etc.) go through your documents and use the headings to determine content. These tags need to be near the top of your document for best results. (Google also uses the bold tag) Descriptive headings can improve your showing in the search engine results. When a search engine finds keywords inserted in headings and high up in the page, the page is indexed higher. Page Content Content: most search engines give preference to content that is in the first 300 and 600 words. Therefore, your most important content should be at the top of the page. Other Meta Tags you can use <meta name="revisit-after" content="15 days"> <meta name="rating" content="General"> <meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL"> <meta name="ObjectType" content="General">
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