Search Engine Strategies

Australian Domains
If your clients are within Australia it is better to have a .au address. Most search engines have the facility to narrow the search to sites within a Country. Preference is given to the .au suffix in the search results displayed.

2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to the above, except you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about.

Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of the salës pages.

3. The text in the title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keyphrases in your title tags,  (guess what people would type in when they are looking for your product/services)

Make these title tags different and specific for each page.

For example, "Widgets and After Salës Widget Services". Whatever you do, don't call the home page "Index", but treat it almost as a mini-description.

4. The other tags (at the top of the html page) between the two "head" tags are not as important as the title tag, but the description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don't use the description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of the main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page.

So you may as well treat the description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in the short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag.

The Alt tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines.

5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help the search engine understand what the page is about).

Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as sp@m or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in the heading tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on the page, therefore less relevant to what the page is about.

6. Don't forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge the importance of your web pages to some extent on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites.

Try to obtain as many links to your site as soon as possible. Ask friends and webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some PageRank, and that it just "feels" good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don't want to be associated with a "bad neighborhood"!

7. Make sure that important keywords are included in the anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your pages.

The inbound link from the other site should take the form of something like this (I'm using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html):

(A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")your important keywords included here(/A).

You should definitely avoid something like (A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about "click here". Be careful!