Your key to success in online marketing and promotion is
your web site. From your title, keywords, meta tags, and
text, to your over all site design, each plays a very
important role when optimizing your site. If your site
doesn't rank in the top 10 or 20 when doing a keyword
search at the top search engines, your target audience
won't be able to find you.
About 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from the
eight major search engines. Most people will go to a search
engine, type in a keyword or keyword phrase and look through
the top 10 - 20 results. Most of the time they'll find what
they're looking for in the first 10 results. The percentage
of click throughs are even smaller. Listing near the top and
grabbing the attention of your target audience is the top
priority. There are many components of your web page that
you should pay close attention to when preparing it for
listing in a search engine.
The first step towards improving your listing is selecting
the best keywords and keyword phrases that best reflect
your web page. Keywords are the foundation of your web
presence in the search engines.
* Keywords
To help you choose effective keywords and keyword phrases,
there are two important steps. First of all, get a Thesaurus
and investigate synonyms for your original keywords. Write
these words down on a sheet of paper. Next, perform your
keyword and keyword phrases search at the major engines.
Pay close attention to the web sites that rank 1 through 10.
View the source code of these pages. Pay close attention to
their placement of keywords in the ,
and
tags. Next, do a search for your competitor's web
sites and view their HTML source code. Noticing patterns is
your key to ranking above them.
* ![]()
Tags
An image alt tag follows your graphic address or url in your
html code. These words will be displayed in place of your
graphics through an older browser or when your visitors have
their graphics turned off. To fully optimize your graphics,
insert several of your keywords in the alt tags of the
graphics located at the top of your pages.
Example:
* Tags
The tag is the first thing that a user sees when
your site is returned by a search query. You only have a
split second to grab your targets attention. Place keywords
that are most pertinent to your business in the title tag.
Effective title tags include only relevant keyword or
keyword phrases. Avoid non-indexing filler words, such as
a, an, the, welcome and home page.
Example: Web-Source.net Webmasters Resource Directory -
Free resources for the webmaster - marketing, advertising,
promotion, classified ads & more. .
* tags
tags are HTML code that enable the search engines to
determine what keywords are relevant to this specific site.
The META "description" tag will contain a description of
your site. Make sure your description contains some of
your relevant keywords.
The META "keywords" tag will contain a listing of your
keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your
site and enable a search engine to find you.
Example:
* Text
Not only are the html tags an important part of optimization,
but it is almost just as important to add plenty of text to
your pages. Your text should contain each of your keywords
used in different variations. I.E. If your keywords are free,
promotion, marketing, advertising, Your text might say
something like this; Promotion, Marketing and Advertising
are the key to your success. We offer many promotional
resources, including; Free marketing articles, classified
advertising and free promotion.
Optimization will be your solution to winning the search
engine wars.
About the Author
Shelley Lowery is the Webmaster of Web-Source.net -
A complete resource portal for the Internet entrepreneur.
The site assists the entrepreneur in developing a serious
Web presence by providing a wealth of free information,
resources, tools and content.
http://www.web-source.net 
