Search Engine Optimization Tips

By Daniel F O'Connor

How is your website optimized? Is it set up to be spidered by the search engines, or have you been letting things slide recently?

I'm forever looking at websites and grumbling to myself about how much better they could be. Always looking at things like title tags and wondering why the webmaster couldn't be bothered to do just a bit more to make it more attractive to the search engines.

But that's the way it goes, isn't it? Before I point out the proverbial HTML splinter in Website X's eye, maybe I should first get the beam out of my site's eye. It's always difficult to be objective about things we're close to.

I'm going to give you a couple of really easy tips to help the SEO (search engine optimization) of your website.

SEO is what will help your site get good rankings when people go looking for things on Google, Yahoo and the rest. It could make the difference between someone skipping right over your site (or even not seeing it, because they don't go down the list far enough to reach you), and getting a click through to your site.

1. Give your website pages titles the search engine 'spiders' can understand

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. Which do you think a search engine will rate more highly when it's performing a search for the phrase 'marketing newsletter':

A) websiteX.com/marnews.html

or

B) websiteY.com/marketing-newsletter.html?

I know, I know, how obvious does that sound? But it's something I didn't get around to changing on my site until recently. It'll be a bit time consuming and boring changing however many page titles you have, but do this for your website, too. It's worth it.

2. Think about Metatags

Metatags are not the be-all and end-all of SEO, but are still important enough to spend time on. One of the many jobs they do is to tell search engines how to show your site when it appears in the results pages.

The 'description' tag helps with this. Take how eBay is displayed in Google's results. The top line is the clickable link. What's beneath that is the title. In eBay's case, it says 'Buy and sell electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, digital cameras, and everything else on...' Sounds like a good description of the site, right?

Even so, the last bit of eBay's description gets chopped in full flow. You only have around 100 characters to state your case before the Ellipsis of Death cuts you off and I also have been guilty of ignoring that in the past.

My site's description tag used to go on and on (and on) about what I did, what services I offered, desperately trying to stuff in as many keywords as possible. And, inevitably, it got chopped off half-way through my big sales pitch.

Not only was it too long, it was incredibly annoying! I wrote it to focus on the word 'copywriter' and get noticed by the search engines, but overdid the persistence factor! Check out my website - link below - to see how I've written it now.

This is the HTML you need to to write your description tag. Don't forget to add '' brackets around everything:

META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your content goes in here."

Happy SEO-ing.

Daniel O'Connor is a top freelance marketing copywriter in the UK.
See his satisfaction-guaranteed website's [http://www.daniboy.com/aboutdaniboy.html]copywriter profile

He's worked for some of the biggest companies in the world -- including NTT and Mitsubishi Electric, not to mention the 1998 Olympic Winter Games -- as well as some of the smallest.

And he can do a job for you, too.

Daniel is supremely qualified at explaining complicated things in a simple way. There's nothing you can throw at him that he won't have dealt with before.

Because it's all about one thing: the words. The right words for you and your business.

Blog articles. SEO for websites. Direct marketing. White papers. Flyer advertising. You want words? Get in touch right now, because Daniel O'Connor has what you need.

Want to try out his writing before getting in touch? Check out his [http://www.daniboy.com/ezinesignup.html]free business ezine

See this article in its original context and many others by going to the Articles section of Daniboy's website.

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