The High-Traffic Site: If You Build It,Visitors Will Come - Optimization
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For any text on the Web to be successful, you’ll want to optimize your content for the search engines. You know how search engines work. They scan Web sites for words and phrases entered by Internet surfers, and then rank these sites by determining how often those words appear on pages.
No Web site, no matter how content-rich and utterly spectacular, is going to come up in every single online search. That’s why it’s a good idea for your to focus on one broad theme for your Web site. Is it a personal page? Does it offer business advice? Know what your Web site is about, and then you’ll be able to discover your keywords.
Write a list of words and phrases associated with your site’s topic. These will be your keywords, and therefore the focus of your search engine optimization efforts. To optimize content for the Web, make sure your keywords appear frequently (once or twice in every paragraph) in your site’s content. This means every blog post, article and block of text should be rich in keywords. This increases your chances of being found by the search engines, which in turn increases your chances of being found by all those visitors you want. Keywords should also appear in titles, be they blog posts or articles, as this also increases your chances of achieving a high rank with the search engines.
META
Search engines don’t simply offer links to pages; little summaries or descriptions often follow the links. This can be done, for your site, with META tags, which are just another HTML device. For instance, your site is all about politics. Your META tags (which should appear on every page you’d like to optimize for the search engines) will look something like this:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT=“Up-to-the-minute political coverage on the latest elections, events and news from Capitol Hill“>
Whatever you type in after CONTENT will be what appears in any search engine result list. For your META tags to be complete, you’ll also want to make your keywords accessible to the engines. Use only the keywords which actually appear on the page where you’re writing the code. This tag will read:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="politics, government, Washington DC, Capitol Hill, Senate, Representative, election, votes, news">
To complete your tags, make sure your page is open to all search engines:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">
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