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.

Since the spiders see your page as HTML code instead of what is directly visible on your HTML pages, optimizers must gain a solid understanding of the structure of a typical HTML document as well.

This lesson will guide you through some HTML basics and then tell you which elements are critical for optimization and why.

After the preliminary research, you will be set up with the list of keyword suggestions for every page of your site; 5 to 20 suggestions for each page should be enough.

The best optimization technique is to get every one of your pages optimized for one or two (maximum three) excellently matching keywords. Thus, the aim of the advanced keyword research is to pick out the best 1-2 keywords for every page of your site from the list of 5-20 suggestions you have obtained at the end of the preliminary research.

You will be able to better understand the basics of your keyword selection tasks if you keep in mind how Web surfers usually enter their queries and what results they expect back.

Most engines will offer you advanced search options. It is important for us to consider the possibility of constraining the search to an exact match with the help of double quotes. Thus, if you type in the search box Free Marketing Newsletter you will get around 8,000,000 results as competition. These are the pages that randomly contain the words "Free", "Marketing" and "Newsletter", in various combinations.

Your domain name, the URLs of your pages and your title tag are some of the influential factors for your search engine rankings.

For example, a domain name such as: http://www.buy-furniture-online.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming that they had identical keywords and page content. Thus, the conclusion is that you should try to use a domain name which contains your keywords. (those you've found during your preliminary research).

To start with our keyword research, we will first figure out which segment of Web surfers we want to find our site, and, subsequently, which terms will most probably bring these visitors to us.

Unfortunately, today it's not enough to figure out the keywords that make the essence of your business. If the industry is competitive (such as, for instance, Web hosting and Web design), there are lots of sites competing to be on the top for these terms. Luckily, Web surfers become more and more conscious of the need to make their search specific – people who are serious about their search look for "Los-Angeles Web hosting" or "Linux Web hosting" instead of just "Web hosting". Therefore, it gives a bit more variety to optimizers

The first thing to remember is that the search engines rank "pages", not "sites". What this means is that you will not achieve a high ranking for your site by attempting to optimize your main page for ten different keyword phrases. However, different pages of your site WILL appear up the list for different key phrases if you optimize each page for just one of them. If you can't use your keyword in the domain name, no problem – use it in the URL of some page within your site, e.g. in the file name of the page. This page will rise in relevance for the given keyword. All search engines show you URLs of definite PAGES when you search – not just the root domain names like www.webuniver.com but the paths like www.webuniver.com/marketing/seo_sem/who_feeds_who_search_engines_relationships_2/.

The search engines are large corporations, with complex ownerships and partnerships between them. While some are more technology oriented and mainly outsource their database and crawling software, others are commercially-specific and will speculate on their large user audience to sell you listings and advertising opportunities.

This brief lesson is intended to give you an insight of who owns who in the contemporary search world and which search engines provide the results for which. Knowing this, you will better understand which ones are the best to target when you're optimizing your pages.

A while ago, there were many different engines, almost equally popular among visitors, that were constantly competing in popularity, number of searches, efficiency of search technology, number of indexed pages, etc. Nowadays, after a period of incorporation, all minor companies are owned by the larger ones.