Vital HTML Tags of SEO

There are millions of web sites on the Internet, with more and more being added every day. One of the best ways finding any of these web sites is by using search an engine, but the search engine may result more than 1000’s of websites. Websites with good ranking are listed in first few pages.

Well! How would you make your website listed as high as possible in the result set?
In order to achieve this you need to work on Search engine optimization. Search engine optimization can be difficult and confusing task. We have gathered some important tips to make it ease and help you understand the process involved.

Page Title
The title tag of your page is the single most important factor to be considered when optimizing your web page for the search engines. It is because most engines & directories place a high level of importance on keywords that are found in your title tag.
The title tag is what the search engines displays it as title in the search results. So make sure each page on your web site has a title tag in the header of document. It is best to use the title for your page that describes the content of your page as much as possible in the most descriptive way.

• Maintain title tag length between 50- 80 chars including spaces.
• Include 1-2 most important keyword phrases in the title.
• Ensure you make it as a readable sentence with keywords.
• Do not just list all keywords, doing so will make search engine suspect you as spamming.
• Spamming may lead to being blacklisted by the search engines.
• Make your title enticing! Even though you’re #1 in the search engine listing still it need to say something the surfer actually need, only then click-through will happen.

Meta Tags
Meta tags are one of the most important elements of a web page when a search engine indexes it. This was originally created to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise. For example, related keywords or a description of the page itself.
A search engine to display a short description of what your web page contains very often uses the description Meta tag. Some search engines look at the keywords entered into the keywords meta tag and will use this to display your page in the search results if it is one of the words used in the search criteria.

• Keyword Meta tag not to exceed 1024 chars – includes spaces and commas.
• Description Meta tag not to exceed 250 chars - includes spaces and commas.
• Make sure you accurately describe the page content in the Description Meta tag.
• Description Meta tag should have 3-4 important key words. Especially those used in title tag and page copy.
• Always Keep important keywords appearing at the beginning of description.
• Keyword Tag should maintain all keywords appearing in the title tag, description tag and the page copy.

Page Copy
Like a Meta and Title tags, the page copy is an important element in the search engine optimization process. The page copy being the actual, visible main content of the page -should be presented and arranged in a logical and visually pleasing manner.
Did you know like a visitor to your site reading the page content to figure out what you offer, search engines too does this job. So what they are looking for? Keyword phrases. Yes it is so important that you provide all the keywords on your page copy.

• For best results each page you submit should contain at least 200 words.
• Include all keywords and arrange them in logical and readable manner.
• Keywords provided in title tag and Meta tag should exist in the page copy.
• A number of search engines will index the first few lines of your web page, so try to make first few lines as descriptive as possible using most important keywords.

HyperLinks
Try to place as many descriptive text links in your homepage to other relevant pages in your site. Doing this can help you to improve your listing in the search engines.
The search engines basically figure that if you are linking to something from your page is likely to be closely related to the content of your page. For that reason some of the engines actually look for keywords in the hyperlinks and any text immediately surrounding the hyperlinks. It means that you should include your most important keyword phrases in the link itself and possibly the surrounding text.

• Hyperlinks improve search engine listing.
• Try to place most important keyword phrases inside the hyperlink itself.
• (Or) Try to place most important keyword phrases adjacent to the link.

Image 'alt' Attribute
Most of the web sites contain images, so it is important that you use the alt attribute on images and describe as much as possible about the image. Doing this not only help index your site better also helps those visitors to your site who are visually impaired.

• Use keywords no more than 2-3 per image.
• Describe the image and don’t just list the keywords.
• Use no more than 1-2 brief sentence to describe the image.

Incoming Links
Make sure you have links coming into as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? Obviously you have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming into the home page? You have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.
Many search engines, including Google, will return your web site higher in search results by the amount of web sites that link to your site web pages, also the higher the profile of the site that links to yours, the higher your listing in search results.

Design Problems
Unfortunately for some of you due to potential design problems/issues your site may not be listed in the search engines no matter how well you optimize and submit them. It could be because of common problems in usage of Frames, Dynamic URLs, Flash and JavaScript. If you use any of them don’t worry almost everything can fixed or work around could be found.

Frames
Frames tend to cause search engine spiders allot of problems when indexing your site, as many won't recognize the document that opens up your frames and so wont index your pages. To help over come these problems put your page copy into NOFRAMES section – a part of the FRAMESET. Actually NOFRAMES section is intended for browsers that can't handle frames, but nowadays almost all the browsers support frames. Though frames are supported your main page doesn’t have real content without the usages of NOFRAMES.

• Use NOFRAMES section inside FRAMESET.
• Implement best title, meta tags on the frameset page.
• Use maximum possible internal hyperlinks inside NOFRAMES, helps spiders to crawl.