SEO pt.II: SEO-friendly site content
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009Now 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.
Example: <title> Free matchmaking, online dating service for pet lovers singles and their pets </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).
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 going to be recognized by some search engines. 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 always 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
community like mine?”. Looking for an answer, don’t forget to consider the opinion of your friends and colleagues – ask as many people as possible. Recall the words or phrases you used searching for your competitors on the web. Take into account the geographical language peculiarities (the British will definitely use the word ‘flat’ referring to mortgage instead of the traditional American ‘apartment’). Analyze the list of suggestions you’ll get. It makes sense to use keyword combinations (phrases) besides single keywords, as normally people can’t express what they look for in just one word. But keep in mind that a keyword phrase should not contain more than 3-5 main words.
out the top 10 sites appearing in search results. I bet they have hundreds of pages and most likely thousands of incoming links. This means that winning top positions from these sites will require not less than those hundreds of pages developed and thousands of links acquired by you. If you are just starting your online dating business, remember that it’s ‘better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion’, so we advise to begin with more specific keywords rather than broad ones. Specific keywords will attract fewer visitors to your site, no doubts. But at the same time they will give you significantly more chances to reach top positions in search results. Another advantage of such ’specification’ is that it will more likely bring you visitors belonging to your target audience as compared to fairly competitive broad keywords attracting a number of ‘occasional guests’. So using, for instance, a ‘pet lovers dating site’ (as opposed to a ‘dating site’) keyword combination dramatically cuts down competition and increases chances to involve some really interested potential members into your online community.
