Real World Computing
Optimise and prosper
Where your content appears within the page seems to matter, too - content appearing in the top and bottom thirds of the HTML page seems to get greater weight than content appearing near the middle. Check this by using View Source in your browser.
Step 2: keywords
It's important to include keywords within your copy, but remember that your primary audience is human, not made up of Google spiders. Your copy must read naturally and must serve its main purpose of leading to either a sale or a profitable relationship. Remember, traffic isn't the same as conversion!
You should also include your keywords in any image file names and their ALT tags. For example, a picture of a catfish might be called shark-catfish.jpg, rather than some meaningless file name like dsc28990.jpg. Even if you don't care about accessibility (and you should), include keyword-rich ALT tags to describe your images because search engines see these as text just as they see filenames as text, which has the effect of increasing your keyword density naturally.
Step 3: the right web address
Do you have the best possible web address for your site? The natural choice for your company website is the company name, but this might not be the most effective choice. For example, www.tropical-fish-milton-keynes.co.uk is likely to be a far more effective address than www.jimsfish.co.uk. Why? Because it looks more relevant to Google when someone searches for "tropical fish". That's why it's so important to know what your profitable customers look for. Since fish can't be sent via the post, it's a fair bet that searchers will specify a location in their search terms, such as Milton Keynes.
In fact, if Jim discovers that a large percentage of his profitable customers search for "catfish", he could also register and use www.catfish-milton-keynes.co.uk, but this mustn't be set up as a simple redirect to the main site, since Google sees that as attempting to cheat the rankings. A much better idea is to have a single-page website about catfish with its own URL, which links seamlessly into the main site.
Step 4: the right title
Open your HTML code and you'll see a
Step 5: page file names
In a similar vein, the filename of each page is displayed in green text in Google's organic listings and keywords that appear within it are emboldened. Every page on your website should have a filename that includes the keywords from that page.
Step 6: meta tags
Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, meta tags in the
section of web pages were used to let search engine spiders know what that page contained. Nowadays, Google ignores most of these tags, but some other search engines do still use them, so there's nothing lost by including them. The "keywords" meta tag should include the most important keywords for that page, but only include keywords that actually appear in the content on that page or you might get penalised.
