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 The META Description
Syntax: <meta name="description" content="a short description of your site" /> The contents of the META description tag is what most search engines and directories will show under your title in the search result list. If you have not provided any META Description Tag to your web page, the search engines try to make one for you, often using the first few words of your web page or a text selection where the keyword phrases searched by the users appear. If the Search Engine makes up a description by picking up text from your page, the generated description my not do you web page justice.
The Meta Description Tag needs to be kept brief yet informative. A description of about 25-30 words should do fine. Keywords and key phrases should be included in the Meta Description Tag, though care should be taken not to repeat them too often. Like the title tag, the META Description tag should be customized for each page depending on the content theme and target keywords of this page. You can get the exact recommendations for keyword usage in the META description tag by running the SEO Tool on your pages. Remember that the Yahoo! family of search engines considers META tags when determining relevancy, which makes the META description more important. Also remember that even though Google doesn't consider the META description tag when determining relevancy, it often uses the contents of this tag in the snippet description of your page in the search results. So, make your description captivating and designed to attract the traffic. The Meta Description Tag should be appealing to users, tempting them to click on the link to your site and visit your Web estate. If you're trying to get a page ranked for a very difficult and competitive keyword, try moving the keyword phrase to different locations inside the description tag. You may find that using the keyword phrase toward the middle of the tag may at times be more effective with certain engines. Following is a nice example of an informative description optimized for "weather forecast software": "The only weather forecast software that brings long-range weather forecasts, daily horoscopes, biorhythm calculator, Web cams, and weather maps to your desktop." The body text The main textual content that is placed within the body tag and is visible to your visitors is an important strategic field for keyword scattering. Remember the importance of keyword prominence and place your keyword phrase early in the body text of the page. This may also become a means to communicate your message to prospects; some search engines retrieve the first few lines of your Web page and use them as the description of your site in the search results. So, put a number of important keywords in the first few lines (specifically within the first 25 words) in the visible part of your body text. Try to tailor the text in the beginning so that it can be used as a description of your site. Spread your keyword phrases throughout the body of the page in natural sounding paragraphs, try to keep separate words of your key phrases close together for proximity sake. Put a secondary key phrase in the middle and at the end of your body text. Use some of your keywords in bold (for this purpose, it's better to use the "<b>" tag instead of styles of logical <strong> formatting. However, you can still apply the necessary styles to this text by the following trick: <b style="font-weight:bold">). Remember your content minimum for a page is 100 words but it's better to reach far beyond this limit. HTML headings h1 – h6 The headings themselves are a good means of visually organizing your content. Besides, Search engines consider the headings and sub-headings of your page, (especially those in bold), to be important. Take advantage of this by using H1, H2 and H3 tags instead of graphical headings, especially towards the top of your page. Use heading tags to break up your page copy and make it easier to read and absorb for your visitors. Include your most important search keywords and phrases within the heading text. So it follows that using your target keywords and phrases within these headings means the search engines will give them more relevancy weight. Thus, you should always try to use your target keywords within the headings and sub-headings to break up the text on your page. Page Heading incorporating most important keyword phrase Sub-Heading 1 incorporating most important keyword phrase Paragraph of text incorporating other target keyword phrases Sub-Heading 2 incorporating next most important keyword phrase Paragraph of text incorporating other target keyword phrases And so on… The problem about headings is that each type of browser has its own way showoff displaying them them that may not match your design ideas. You may apply the following workaround with the help of the style attribute: <h1 style="font-size:10px;color:#00FFFF;font-weight:bold">This is the formatted heading</h1> Or with the class attribute, provided the class is defined somewhere in a style sheet. The search engine will see a first level heading here, but the browser will show human visitors the text formatted as you need instead of standard level one heading. What you should avoid is trying to repeat the same level tag more than one time. This means you shouldn't have more than one <h1> tag on your page indicating your main topic is streamlined around a single definite concept. The same applies to tags of all other levels, 2 through 6. Link text Keyword usage is important in the visible text (also called anchor text) of links pointing outside your domain (also called outbound links) as well as links to the internal pages. When you give your users a reference to other documents relative to your theme, the words you use to refer to those documents are considered descriptive for your page's profile. A usual link would look like this: Click here for <a href="http://www.somesite.com/keyword-phrase.html" title="this text will appear when user mouse-overs the link">Visible link text</a> Note: When you link to your own pages, rename these pages so that the URLs contain keywords separated with a hyphen – instead of running the keywords together. By breaking the words up in some way, you let the engines see them as individual words in a phrase. If the words are not broken up, the spiders will see the words as a single term. Don't flood your links with keywords; usually it's enough to have up to three links per page containing your targeted terms, desirably the first three links. ALT attributes of images Alt tags consist of alternative wording for images that is displayed in browsers that can't display images, did not download the image for some reason, or is spoken by talking browsers for the blind. Search Engines use the text in the alt tags to substitute the anchor link text if the image is a hyperlink. This makes these attributes ideal for optimization. Example: <img src="images/logo.gif" alt="Graphic of a weather forecast software" width="415" height ="100" / > As a rule, if you insert your keyword phrase in your ALT text (as long as you are also describing the graphic), you'll have a boost in relevancy with many of the engines. Google often picks up the first ALT text on the page and uses it as the description in the search results, so pay special attention to the ALT text in your first graphic. To avoid spamming, never remove the actual graphic description from the ALT attributes when you're populating them with your key phrase, and do not plant your keyphrase into more than the first three ALT image attributes on the page and then perhaps the last one as well.
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