Google best search engine optimization seo practices - part 3

The third part of this article will concentrate on the meta tags area of the optimization for Google. I will mention them in the order they should normally appear in the source code. I will review 5 essential meta areas.

The DTD statement.

This should be the first tag of the head section of your code. The Document Type Definition Statement allows faster and deeper indexing with Google, shortening the time your site will be in the “trustbox” as well. HTML 4.0 or 4.01 should be the standard, and for most cases, the Transitional type should be used.

The title, the most important.

Why? Because there are 3 elements in SEO: the listing (were title is the main element) the click-through (were title is the main reason) and conversion (which is the object of all optimization work) Also, if that is not reason enough (it should) it is the single element that gests indexed and used to list the link text in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). An average of 7 to 8 words length is optimal.

The description.

Used by Google to create a text summary in describing the page if available, so make sure the content of this tag is friendly to the searcher, not the search engine. If you are in a competitive market, this tag is not taken into account, but you should have it for your visitor. An average length of 150 characters is good.

The keywords.

Google actually uses this tag against you, by that meaning it is used as a spam check point for the page content. Also, do not include your niche keywords here, as you will be given your competition tips about your optimization. Put your main keywords across the content instead. Here use an average of 200 characters.

Make sure you are using different sets of keywords per page, in other words, that they are unique to each particular page.

The charset type.

Another element of the head section, this one tells the browser what to do when it encounters certain characters in your pages. Google indexes pages easier with the 8859-1 tag, since it will not do any data encoding, which can take a lot of extra time. The UTF-8 tag involves encoding and it should be used for forms that accept non standard characters, like foreign users from other countries.

Search engines web directories

The so called search box should be given a correct name “search engine” which can be further divided into keyword search engines and web directories. Web surfers can make use these two types of searching methods alternatively for better search results.

Search engines accumulated their data volume through spiders or robots that work among billions of websites and collect them back to the databases and index them into good order for future query by web surfers. Complicated algorithm will perform calculations and pick up right results according to keywords provided by web surfers.

There are virtually countless websites for spiders to crawl. How spiders crawl these sites? They start crawling those sites that attract bigger volume, coming to the end through sophisticated internal links. And that is the reason why website should always be linked to high traffic site for optimum market exposure.

Search engine crawlers will crawl web pages periodically for updated contents. The newly added contents should be available to web surfers at the next database updates which normally take few days up to few months.

At the moment, there are two types of submissions are available: paid inclusion and pay for placement. Through paid inclusions, websites can be indexed into database efficiently including your newly added contents. However, your paid inclusion does not guarantee your rankings in search engines. The best advice would be having a perfectly optimized web page ready before any paid procedures.

Pay for placement will give you immediate ranking for any targeted keywords. The higher you bid the better your ranking will be. And pay per click system will let advertisers have more say as to how their advertising budget will be corrected allocated. Normally, these search engines have many affiliates to cover more advertising areas.

Unlike Search Engines send out spiders to crawl websites automatically, the web directories accumulate their database manually by human editors. The most important web directory is the Open Directory Project ( dmoz. org) that compiles databases manually and indexed websites of extreme high quality and unique contents.

To submit urls to web directories, you must first make sure if the site you are going to submit has been indexed already. You can check up this by entering your website url in the search box. Then choose the category that best correspond to your products and services.

After you get the proper category, submit your site by clicking the button of suggest a site or suggest url and follow the instructions. In the mean time, correct titles, descriptions, keyword meta etc should be well written. Promotional adjectives such the best and the most should be avoided.

Following strictly the rules listed would be our heart and soul suggestion to get your site listed successfully.