If you want to establish a presence in the highly competitive online market, getting yourself listed on the major search engines should not be an option, but a priority. There are essentially two ways to get your site listed: manually submit it, or optimize your pages in a manner that naturally attracts the search engine robots. Because manual submission is generally a straightforward process, this article will focus on the harder part, which is fine-tuning your site.
The Importance of HTML Tags
Even if you plan to submit your site to a search engine, it is vital to make sure your pages are optimized to send the spiders crawling. Ensuring optimization involves implementing keywords and paying attention to your HTML tags. There are many of these tags and you should make yourself familiar with them if you want yourself to rank well in the search engines.
Title Tags
The title tag can be found at the top of every HTML document and should contain vital information the search engine spiders can use to index your site. If possible, this is where you want to insert your relevant keywords.
ALT Tags
Though not as important as in past times, ALT tags can still be key to boosting your rankings. You can get away without them, but since most search engine spiders will be looking for all the text they can cram into the database, it is to your advantage to implement keywords here as well.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are crucial for getting a quality search engine ranking. These tags appear between the head and body tags at the start of an HTML document. Similar to the title tag, it provides the search engine spiders with essential information about your site. Meta tags are such a huge factor because they aid in determining what your site is about and ultimately how your site will be indexed.
Optimizing your HTML tags will make the listing appear more concise, increasing your chances of getting a higher ranking. Once you get this data together, make sure the text on your site corresponds with the keywords you have elected to use. Even more important is to ensure that the content on your site is well written and makes sense. You never want to sacrifice rankings for quality because it could come back to hurt you in the end. If your site is difficult to navigate and contains grammatical or other errors, the spiders will have a much harder time processing the data. When tuning your site, remember that optimization should always involve taking care of the search engine and your visitors as well.
Conclusion
During your mission for search engine rankings, be patient and never take your attention away from the other vital aspects that can make your site a success. The process of getting high listings can be a grueling one but most webmasters find that it is all worth it in the end.
January 17th, 2010 at 12:14 am
Something that has confused many people is the distinction between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Let’s clear it up. WordPress.com is brought to you by some of the same folks who work on WordPress, the open source blogging software. In addition, WordPress.com utilizes the same WordPress software which you can download at WordPress.org. With WordPress.com the hosting and managing of the software is taken care of by the team here at Automattic. With WordPress.org you need to install the software on your own server or with a 3rd party provider.
January 20th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Hey Awesome Post! I found it on Google. Keep up the great work!