Home | Site Map

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search engine optimization can be difficult and confusing. Knowing this we decided to put together some tips to help you with the process. They cover everything you need to know about optimizing your web pages for the search engines quickly and easily.

Search engine optimization tips listed in order of importance:

Additional search engine optimization tips:

These tips are here because they can be useful to those that can implement them on their web site, but they are not necessary to achieve good listings in the search engines.

Hyperlinks.
Headings.

Optimizing Text Hyperlinks

Did you know that text based hyperlinks can help improve your listing in the search engines? The search engines basically figure that if you are linking to something from your page whatever it is you are linking to is likely to be closely related to the content of your page. For that reason some of the engines actually look for keywords in the hyperlinks and any text immediately surrounding the hyperlinks. What this means to you is that if you can you should include your most important keyword phrases in the link itself and possibly the surrounding text.

Tag tips:

Try to include your most important keyword phrases within the hyperlink itself.
Try to include your most important keyword phrases in the text that immediately preceeds, or follows the the hyperlink.
Becareful not to keyword stuff! Make sure your links and surrounding text are still readable and make sense after you include a keyword phrase or two.

Optimizing Heading Tags

Although they are not used very frequently any longer HTML heading tags can help improve your listings in the search engines too. Since they are "headings" the search engines figure that they are very closely related to the content of the page that they appear on. So, just like with all of your other optimization efforts you should include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can.

What they look like:

HTML heading tags have 4 different sizes and are formatted as you see below.

<h1>Heading Size 1</h1>

<h2>Heading Size 2</h2>

<h3>Heading Size 3 </h3>

<h4>Heading Size 4</h4>

Where they belong:

Headings can go anywhere within the HTML of your page.

Tag Tips:

Try to include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can.
Consider rethinking your page content. It is often very easy to take an existing page full of copy and find ways to break it up into separate sections with headings.