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SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

written by: Daniel Stout

So you want your site to be listed in all the major search engines, right? Before you head over to submit your site for inclusion (covered below), you first need to get your site's meta tags optimized -- on every page. This sounds like a daunting task to most people, but the truth of the matter is that it's quite easy! Let's take it step by step:

Recognize where your meta tags are located. Your page does have them, right? (I've seen a lot of sites that are missing them completely!) Feel free to view the source code for this page, or any other on the site if you need reference. They must be located at the top area of your page, inside the <head> tags.
Look at your page's contents, including information in the <alt> tags of your images. Make note of all the important words and phrases that are used, especially the ones that occur frequently. If you have trouble finding any textual content on your page, then you should really think about adding some - it is crucial for all the search engines to work with your site! (They can't 'see' pictures, only text.) Keep in mind that these words and phrases should ideally be the same words and phrases that you think people will be searching for.
Now that you have your 'key' words and phrases selected, you're ready to edit the contents of your meta tags! I'll start break them down one by one: (Remember, you can view the page source and use the meta tags for this site as an example and/or guide.)
- Keywords: This is an extremely important tag. Basically, it contains the essential items that make up your page's content, and is also used by most search engines for indexing. In other words, this is the same list you made in step two (above.) So, just go to the keywords tag and start inserting those words and phrases, seperated by commas.A few rules apply to how you do this, and they are very important!
  - The first rule is that you must not repeat words over and over to 'fool' the search engine robots. This will make the search engines 'blacklist' your site from their databases, usually for at least 3 months. In other words, your site will not exist in the search engine world!
  - The second rule is that you need to keep the keywords down to around 20 words/phrases or less. This won't get you blacklisted, but it will take 'points' away from your site's search score, and will therefore keep you from ever getting a respectable rating.
- Description: This is used by search engines to reinforce your keywords, and is also what displays in search results as the site description. For this tag, just go into your description meta tag, and type out a sentence (or two short ones) that uses as many keywords as possible, and at the same time makes sense to someone reading the description alone. Use common sense for this, and try to keep in mind that search engine robots AND human beings are going to be reading this text in one way or another. The only rule for this tag is that you should keep it below 120-150 characters, but less is usually better.
- Title: This may be the single most important of the three tags, as well as the most incorrectly used. The concept is similar to the description's, but you don't need to make it a sentence and it can only contain 60 characters or less. Try to use the most important of your keywords, and don't use things like colons, equal signs, underscores, etc. to make it look 'pretty'. (ex. ==::: Page Title :::== ). Again, try to make it so that the search engine robots and human beings alike can read and understand this text.
- Robots: This is an easy one, but is often neglected. If you don't already have a robots.txt file on your site, simply make a robots.txt file using any plain-text editor, and insert the following 2 lines of text:
  
  User-agent: *
  Disallow:
  
  Those two lines tell all search engines that they are allowed to 'spider' your site. (You can disallow certain types of robots from browsing your site with this file, but I will not cover that at this time - as we want them all to visit!) Save the file, and upload it to the root directory of your site. Then in the robots tag, just insert the following: 'all, index, follow'. (And like it looks, this tells the robots to index all of your pages by following the links.)
- Author: Not a hard one either, but often left out as well. This tag simply the contains the author/creator of the site, and is 'checked' by robots but not actually used. (It just keeps you from losing points on the robot's 'score' on each visit.)
Now go to an online meta tag checker of your preference. I recommend the one I use, provided at http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html. (The link will open in a new window.) Run your page on the checker, and make sure the page's tags all pass (green in color.) If not, this type of tool will show you exactly what words are 'visible' to robots, which will help you make the appropriate changes to your tags.
Everything passing 'green' and looking good now - throughout your entire site? Ok, then let's submit it and get those robots to come pay you the first 'clean' visit of (hopefully) millions! I tend to use all-inclusive tools that submits to multiple sites at once - it saves a ton of time, and they also give you a list of links for submitting to search engines manually. My favorite one is located at http://www.submitexpress.com/list.html. (The link will open in a new window. They also have a nice meta-tag analyzer there, too.)
This is the last step, but maybe the hardest of them all - have patience! It honestly takes time for search engines to store and rank your site, and even the most perfectly optimized sites can take months to show up in searches. But it's ok, since you know you have your meta tags properly optimized and the 'instructions' to tell the robots to browse your site - it's just a matter of time.

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