Search engines examine your website code to try and work out importance and relevancy. The HTML code we are going to look are Meta Tags,title tags, header tags and paragraph tags. They are a small part of the overall formula that search engines take notice of.
Keywords and Descriptions
There are two important tags that appear at the top of your page and should be in a block similar to this…
<head> <meta name="description" content="description about the page" /> <meta name="keywords" content="keywords for your page"> </head>
The text and both tags should relate to each other. For instance, if you are a plumber in the Charante…
<meta name="description" content="Charante plumbing, qualified plumber for all your needs in the Charante area" /> <meta name="keywords" content="Charante, plumbing, plumber" />
The word “Charante” comes first, Google in particular loves local sites. Besides, as a plumber you want locals to find you. They would most likely type in search terms such as “Plumber in the Charante”. The keywords back up and reinforce the description.
Don’t go mad on the length of descriptions. A single short paragraph is enough and a maximum of about 10 keywords. One thing I must mention, search engine really don’t bother much with meta tag keywords. However, things change so include it anyway, it doesn’t cost much in time or page size.
Give the page a title
The page title should be meaningful but also have some of your keywords. Make sure it is meaningful to the reader but at the same time interesting for the search engines. Remember, the title is used when the page is bookmarked and by search engines for their search results. Ensure that each page of your site has a unique title and is not duplicated.
The title tag is at the top of the page and should be similar to this…
<head> <title>This is my page title</title> <meta.... </head>
The body of the page
The main content appears between <body> and </body>. This is where you use standard HTML to signify keyword importance.
Anything that has a title should use <H1>. If you need subtitles then use <H2>. Do not use paragraphs modified with CSS. Search engines look at the code and pick up the header tags (H1,H2…etc). So using our plumber example…
<H1>Plumber in the Charante</H1> <H2>All your local plumbing services</H2>
As you can see we have keywords in the header tags. The <H1> tag contains the main ones, “plumber” and “Charante”. This indicates to the search engines that we consider them as important.
All text should be contained between <P> and </P>. Sprinkle your keywords in the text but remember who reads it. It must make perfect sense to the reader, not the search engines. After all, you are selling to real people.
Verifying your code – validation
Getting your site validated means that the HTML code makes sense and adherers to standards (check yours here…). However, when you start adding widgets like Facebook ‘like’ boxes etc, that can cause validation to fail. Google has stated that non-validated sites are not penalized for badly written code.
Website developers should be writing valid HTML code anyway. Watch out though as many programs that can be used to create sites can include unused or badly formed code. From experience, Dreamweaver seems to be really messy at times.
