What Are The Search Engines Looking For?
When you get started online it might come as a bit of a surprise to find out that you have created your website, all the links are working, everything looks just fine, and yet when you look on any of the main Search Engines, your website is nowhere to be found
What is the reason for this?
You might have heard lots of people tell you about links from other sites, of original content, but you are not sure where to turn
Getting The HTML Tags Right
To begin with you should take a careful note of all the HTML tags on your website, and review your content, to make sure you are not "putting the search engines off" by the way you have put your website together
There are some basic HTML tags that the search engines are looking for. If your website is lacking in these tags, then your website will be downgraded by the search engines. Once downgraded it can take quite a while for the search engines to come back to your website, to check out any new HTML code. So its best to get it right to begin with
The Most Important HTML Tags
From a search engine optimization point of view these are the most important HTML tags:
- The TITLE tag - this is the one line of text that appears right at the top of a viitors browser window, in the little blue strip. The text is displayed in white, and should contain the main title of your page
- The H1 tag - this is the main heading of your webpage. This heading should summarize in one short line the main content of your webpage e.g. mens quartz watch would be a heading for a webpage trying to sell a mens quartz watch
- The META tags - especially the tag description and the tag keywords. You should try and make sure the text set in these tags is accurate, and reflects the true content on your page. Most definately do not just duplicate the same META tag information on every page
- Subheadings in a H2 tag - it is always a good idea to split up your content by using sub headings, just like in a book. This white space will help your readers navigate round your pages, and also add further weight to the main content of your webpages, from a search engine point of view
- Paragraphs - try to start your paragraph tags with your main keyword e.g. if your webpage is about a mens quartz watch, then try and start your first paragraph with "this mens quartz watch..."
Why Do Search Engines Need It Set Out Like This?
Search Engines need your pages to be set out correctly like this - with your main heading reflected in the TITLE tag, the H1 tag, and name.html of your page etc, because they cannot visit every website in their database personally. Therefore they have to use an automated system - often called a spider. This spider comes automatically to your website and gives you a "score" depending on the HTML code that is found. If you think about it for a moment, if you were trying to find out what a webpage was about, there's a good chance that the heading of the page and the name of the page would give you a good guide as to what the page was really about
Make Sure Your Pages Are Set Right
I would always recommend that you learn to get your webpages set right, and that way you will get a much better ranking with the main search engines. It is always best to do this before you actually submit your website to the search engines for the first time. This will save you alot of time and effort later on
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