SEO pt.II: SEO-friendly site content
July 28, 2009 – 3:57 am, by Irene @ SkalfaNow that you have done a great job on selecting the relevant keywords for your site, it’s time to talk about using them on your site efficiently. Well, the word ‘efficiency’ in the given context is something that cannot stand apart from using meta tags.
Basically, meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to help search engines list your site accurately in their indexes by providing structured data about your webpage content. Other than the Title tag, meta tags are not 
visible to the users and serve exclusively to allow search engines and browsers to ‘deal’ with your site more easily and effectively.
Below you fill find a few tips on how to use the meta tags efficiently to make search engines (and users!) like your site.
The title tag– should contain brief information about your site; the total summary of keywords for this tag should not exceed 60 characters, but still try to make it as descriptive as you can since search engines will use it as a title for your listing. Be sure to add your main keyword to it.
Example: <title> Free online dating service for pet lovers </title>
The meta tag – Keywords attribute – this is actually the place for ’storing’ all your keywords. You can add about 1000 characters into this section (commas and spaces count as characters too). Avoid repeating same keywords often (not more than 4-7 times). Although presently this meta tag is ignored by Google (completely ignored, according to what they say), I would still recommend to keep it ‘just in case’. If one fine morning Google decides to return to recognizing keywords meta tag – you will be armed. Plus, this tag may still be of value for other search engines.
Example: <META content=”online dating, dating, matchmaking, pet lovers, pets, cat owner dating, dog owner dating, singles, animal lovers, pet dating, pet health”>
The meta tag – Description attribute – allows you to write the description of what your site is about, which is most likely to be used by search engines while displaying the search results. About 150 characters should be enough for your description to express the site conception, but some search engines allow you for about 400.
Example: <META content=”A dating site for single pet lovers, looking for friendship and love with like-minded personals”>
It is advised that you use meta tags on each page of your site (they should be inserted inside the <HEAD> section of the page). This helps better indexation by search engines and thus, increases your chances for good ranking.
The good question is how to add meta tags to your site. Normally, this can be done through one of the HTML-editors, like Nvu or Dreamweaver. But SkaDate community software developers simplified the process of adding meta information to your dating or social networking site by bringing it to inserting codes to all the site pages right from the Admin Panel/SEO section. You can also add a unique meta title and description to each page via Admin Panel/Languages.
Now let me give you a few pieces of advice on how to get the most out of your relationship with a search engine.
- Make sure that your website textual content includes all the relevant keywords you selected for search engines. And remember that the keywords density should not exceed 5-10%.
- Check all the links on your site. There shouldn’t be any broken or irrelevant links.
- For some important site content (names, links, information) use text rather than images, since Google bots do not recognize text in images. Or at least use alt=”keyword” tag for your images.
- Each page of your site has to be reachable from a at least one static text link.
- Make sure your site is displayed correctly in all browsers.
- Be attentive when it comes to affiliate programs – try to avoid using the textual content on your site identical to content on the other web sources. This may bring you to something opposite to success.
- Be careful using other business’ trademarks among your keywords as this may lead to legal issues in regards to possible misleading the potential users.
And here come a few ‘DON’Ts’ that may not only fail to help you in SEO, but at worst will lead to search engines terminating all kinds of interaction with your site by banning it out from the search results.
- Don’t go for Black Hat SEO (Spamdexing), which includes keyword stuffing (loading pages with keywords irrelevant to the site content) and link farms (a group of websites containing hyperlinks to each-other).
- Don’t use programs sending automated queries to Google, say, for checking the site rank status in search results for various queries.
- Don’t place hidden text or links on your site pages. Here I mean text invisible to site visitors, but available to Google crawlers.
- Don’t allow duplicate content.
- Don’t use cloaking (which is displaying different page content to users and to Google bots)
- Don’t create ‘doorway’ pages intended for crawlers rather than for site users.
These simple rules for managing your site content will help you avoid common mistakes causing unwanted consequences and establish friendly and long-term relationship with search engines.
If you have something to say on this subject – don’t hesitate to leave the article comments expressing your opinion!
Best wishes,
Irene
2 Responses to “SEO pt.II: SEO-friendly site content”
Nice post! I can`t understand anyone spending time, effort and money to build good websites then missing out the basics, like good meta tags. I will say careful handling of Meta Tag Optimization can get you great Ranking Results.
By Web Address on Aug 27, 2009