SEO Guide
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Quick Guide on Optimizing Every Page of Your Site for Search Engines
Introduction:
In this quick guide we are going to be working with the SEO Preparation Tool which can be found at www.web-inspect.com in the left menu. I’m also going to reference to Microsoft FrontPage on how to work on the site. You can use another program, though the instructions may not correspond.
Do this first:
Go to www.web-inspect.com and click on SEO preparation tool. Now put in the URL of each of the web pages you want to optimize, and put in the keyword or phrase you want to optimize for. Click Go and wait to see your score. If your score is not 80 or higher out of 100, you need to follow each of the steps below, and then check it again.
Remember, you need to check EVERY page of your site for the score. Every page of your site may be optimized for the same keyword or each page may be optimized for its own keyword.
The procedure:
There are 7 main areas of EACH webpage that we will focus on, in order to optimize your entire site.
Title the title appears in the very top area of your browser such as Internet Explorer. If you look at the blue bar at the top of your screen while you’re browsing a website, you will see the title of the page you’re on. Each page has it’s own individual title.
According to web-inspect, the title should contain between 6 and 12 words. Though this is not always true, this is what web-inspect recommends for top optimization. Your keyword or phrase should come first, followed by a short description.
To change the title in FrontPage, open up the page you are working with, right-click anywhere on the page and click Page Properties. Here you will see a blank space for the Title. Go ahead and put it in there.
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Meta Keywords the Meta keywords is a hidden section of your site that only search engine robots or spiders can see. They cannot be seen by any visitor to your website unless they view the source of your page.
According to web-inspect, each page should have between 7 and 48 keywords and your main one should appear at least once. It is important that you list the keywords in order of highest to lowest importance. Keywords can also be phrases, and each one should be separated by a comma.
To set up the meta-keywords in FrontPage, open up the page you are working with, right-click anywhere on the page and click Page Properties. Here you will see a blank space for keywords. Put your keywords there.
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Meta Description the Meta description is a hidden section of your site that only search engine robots or spiders can see. It cannot be seen by any visitor to your website unless they view the source of your page.
According to web-inspect, each page should have between 12 and 24 words in your description, with the keyword/phrase appearing at least once. The description should have your keyword / phrase in the beginning. It is usually a normal sentence, but you want to try to include as many important keywords or phrases as you can.
To set up the meta-keywords in FrontPage, open up the page you are working with, right-click anywhere on the page and click Page Properties. Here you will see a blank space for the description. Put your description there.
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Anchor Tags Anchor tags are fairly simple to understand. When you see a link on a webpage the words that are clickable (usually blue underlined) are the anchor tags.
According to web-inspect, each page of your site should have at least 1 anchor tag. This means that there should be at least 1 link on your site linking to somewhere else within your site, or outside the site, that has your main keyword or phrase as the clickable part of the link.
To insert a link in FrontPage, simply click on Insert -> Hyperlink. At the very top where it says Text to Display that is where your keyword goes, that is the Anchor Tag. On the bottom, you set up the actual URL like www.yahoo.com.
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Headlines headlines, or heading tags are very important to optimizing your site (though many people don’t like them because they can ruin how a site looks if not done properly). Headlines are usually large, bold titles that are close to the top of the web-site. This is not an image, this is plain text.
According to web-inspect, each page must contain at least one headline with your keyword / phrase.
In FrontPage you can easily change any text into a headline. Simply highly the text you want to make into a headline (this text should have your keyword / phrase) and in the top left side of FrontPage where it says ‘Normal’ click the drop-down and select Heading 1. This will usually make the text really large. You can now make it smaller by lowering the font size.
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Alt Tags these are hidden tags that appear behind your images. Basically, its made for text-based browsers who cannot show images, but we take advantage of them by hiding our keywords in them.
Web-inspect recommends that at least 3 of your images contain an alt-tag with your keyword or phrase, per page. Now this may be hard to achieve if your page has only 1 graphic, so we work with what we got.
To add an alt-tag to any graphic, in FrontPage, right-click on a graphic and click Picture Properties. Click on the General tab up top and in the field where it says Text: type in your keyword or phrase. Make sure the box gets checked on the left, and now you have an alt-tag for that image.
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Content content refers to any text on your web page that is not a link or graphic sometimes referred to as body.
Web-inspect recommends that you have at least 200 words in the body (content) of each page, and your keyword / phrase shows up at least once.
In FrontPage you simply type text into the body of your web page, and make sure you include your keywords in the text. Do not over do it.
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Conclusion:
Now that you have gone through all the optimizing steps, it is time to go back to www.web-inspect.com and click on SEO preparation tool. Now put in the URL of each of the webpages you have optimized, and put in the keyword or phrase you optimized for. Click Go and wait to see your score. Your score should be above 80/100 for every single page of your site.
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