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Search Engine Optimization

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Search Engine Optimization

Search optimization involves updating your site so that it can be accurately indexed by search engines. Search engines most often use “spiders” or “robots” which are programs that open a page on your site and read the contents to find relevant information for their search catalog. They will then follow each link until they have indexed every page on your site.

Indexing occurs on a periodic basis and search engine “bots” will return to make sure their catalogs are still accurate. Also, you can submit your site to search engines and request they index your site immediately, this is especially important if your site has yet to be indexed or if you drastically change the content on your site.

To index each page these “bots” will use the text it finds in your page as well as special “meta-tags” which contain information describing your page. There are three meta-tags used by most search engines today, which are Title, Keywords, and Description. Below is an overview of each tag as well as some guidelines for using them:

Title

The page title is often the most important piece of information used by search engines. They often consider the page title to be extremely relevant to the content of the page and place a high significance of this for their search results. The title is almost always used as the name of the page when displayed in search engine results.

Description

The description meta-tag is used somewhat for indexing purposes, but is primarily used as the summary for each page displayed in search engine results.

Note: This summary along with the page title is all search engine users will see for your listing in search engine results. Thus, descriptions should be written in a way to interest potential visitors so they will want follow that link to your site.

Keywords

The keywords meta-tag should contain important words or phrases that are relevant to the information found on your page. Basically, keywords should be a list of terms that a user might search for using a search engine. Search engines place a varying amount of significance on keywords. Since many sites manipulate keywords to yield better results, some search engines place more weight on the page title or the actual content found on each page. Nevertheless, keywords are very important in optimizing your pages for accurate indexing by search engines.

ALT Tags

Another consideration for search engine optimization is the use of ALT tags for images. Search engine bots can only read text-based information found on your pages, thus graphics (even those containing text) are not use in search engine indexes. However, a description for each image on your page can be added in the form of an ALT tag (ALT for alternate text). ALT tags are readable be search engines and necessary for proper indexing of graphic-heavy pages.