Web Design

Since the ultimate goal is for your site to be found, it must be easy to access and navigate. So have each page cater to different keyword searches. Use the keywords that you expect surfers to use to locate you in the site’s text.

In most cases, the document title has the most significant effect on the visibility of a web page, and it is the first few words that are the most significant of all; prefacing your title with the words "Welcome to …" will square unfavorably for your search placement aspirations. Think of that first screen as the front page of a newspaper.

Really important information goes on the front page, and the most important goes at the top. For all these reasons, it is important to provide thoughtful and descriptive titles and text as well as to avoid vagueness.

Make an effort to be as concise as possible for this factors into how your searches are managed – the more text you have the less strong its effects will be. In addition, there is a technical device known as meta-tags. These provide information about the document behind the page. It is commonly used for making documents searchable (by adding keywords). The data included in a meta-tag is useful for servers, web browsers, and search engines but is invisible to the reader. A document may have any number of meta-tags:

• Description – This provides a brief plain-language description of the contents of your web page, which is particularly useful if your document contains little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top of the HTML document. Search engines that recognize the description tag may display it in the search results listed. Some search engines only use the first 20 words of descriptions, so get to the point quickly.

e.g.
<meta name="description" content="A helpful Elephant related site on the Internet to find out anything about elephants.">

• Keywords – You can supplement the title and description of the document by providing a list of comma-separated keywords that would be useful in indexing your document. Some search engines do not read your keywords tag. It is important not to repeat an identical word formation more than 3 times here. Try to keep this tag to under 45 words.

e.g.
<meta name="keywords" content="elephant, Elephants, Pachyderm, ELEPHANT, ivory, tusk, tusker, news, compassion, rights, care, repository, information, Elephant infrasound, endangered species, elephant.elehost.com">

• Author – Identifies the author of the web page.

e.g.
<meta name="creator" content="Elehost Web Design Inc.">

• Copyright – Identifies the copyright information for the document.

e.g.
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright by Elehost Web Design Inc.1999. All Rights Reserved.">

In employing keywords it is helpful to target your search criteria. The most common method is to identify your competition since they will be closely related to your site. Once you know what keywords worked for the "leaders", you can follow their path. Run an inquiry (on the below application) by entering your URL and it will generate a report on your 2 main meta tags. This will provide you with some basic checking on your keyword dominance.

Although you may have much to say, keep it to a few pertinent words for your keyword searches (focus on five or less). To refine keyword searches for effectiveness you will have to build upon the area of your concern, that is, playing with the good and weeding out the bad. A ranking in the top ten results is a sign of superior language manipulation. Please note that if you use words in different ways such as pluralizing them adding an -ing or another prefix or suffix, the main body of the word may not show up in your top ten, but this will certainly be influential in helping your search engine listing as most search engines will look for your search word within other words as well. This is the easiest way to repeat a word without search engines realizing that the word is being repeated.

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