How to create your home page to be search engine friendly

Words, words, words! They make a significant difference in the way your website is seen and understood, not by people but by search engines. To bring your website to the top of the heap, you need to pay close attention to the words you use and how you use them. Making your site compliant with search engine algorithms is a must if you want extensive search engine exposure. This is, of course, more important if your reach is widespread, but don’t overlook the power of locating the search engine algorithm as well. Is that how it works.

Search engine spiders look for certain things. Searches are based on keywords and keywords are defined by meta tags on your website. But simply defining keywords is only the first step. Search engine spiders look to see if all or some of your keywords appear in the page or site title (we’re talking about your home page here), if they appear in the site description meta tag, and if they appear with some frequency in the body of your home page giving the first 300 to 400 words more weight than the rest of the page. Finally, search engine spiders look to see if words not defined as keywords appear with any frequency in the body, title, and description, and if they do, the spider penalizes your site (the spider ignores grammatical words like prepositions , conjunctions and pronouns).

So what is one to do? The simplest advice is to pay attention to the use of defined keywords and how they are used in the description, title and body of your home page. But like all simple advice, this is bad advice. Oh don’t get me wrong here, paying attention is important and it’s where you want to start, but it’s not enough. As a starting point, however, it is appropriate. So start by defining keywords and phrases that you think people might search for. Some research is in order here. Two basic suggestions come to mind. First of all, carry out searches on the keywords that you consider appropriate. Look at the keywords defined by the sites that appear at the top after ignoring the paid sites by looking at the source code of the top 2 or 3 sites. You can see the source code through the see source tab in your browser. This information is invaluable as it gives you a list of what successful search engine sites see as keywords. Second, most search engines provide a keyword generator and there are some basic keyword generators available in commercial and shareware packages. Using one of these sources, you will be able to produce keywords that you might not otherwise have thought of.

So the keywords are now defined. Your next step is to include several keywords in your title. So you sell widgets. His company name is ABC Widget Company. Great. Widgets is one of your keywords, even better. But you also have bargain, cheap, save money and quality as keywords. Your title might say: ABC Widget Company: Home of Quality Widgets at Bargain Prices That Save You Money, a title that includes not just widgets, but also bargains, quality and money savings. The title, by the way, appears in the tab above the page you’re viewing. It’s also the header that appears when your page is displayed in search results. In reality, the only entity that pays attention to the title is the search engine spider that crawls the web.

Their site description follows. This is the blurb that appears below the title displayed in search engine results. The copy writing here is a bit more complicated because you want it to sound natural while using as many of your keywords as possible. You will now see many sites defining hundreds of keywords, repeating words and phrases. This is absolutely unnecessary and can even be expensive as the spider crawls your site. Widgets, bargain, quality, cheap, savings, money as defined keywords cover searches like cheap quality widgets or sale widgets or quality widget (note that widget and widgets have the same value; plural is also seen as singular). So limit your keywords to around 10, but make sure they are flexible and can be used in combination. If you’re locating, add a location keyword as well. Now writing your description becomes easier. ABC Widget Company. We offer widgets at bargain prices to save you money. That we sell cheap does not mean that we skimp on production or quality. Look, we use all the keywords and the description doesn’t read like a forced composition. In short, limiting keywords to a manageable number while remaining flexible about combinations makes writing descriptions easier than if you had hundreds of keywords.

Finally, the body. Two things to keep in mind. Use each keyword in the first 300 words of your body copy. If you don’t use them, the spider can’t see why you defined them as keywords in the first place and will penalize your site. Second, take inventory of ALL the words you use on the page and how often they appear. Ignore the grammatical words. If you see a specific word in content that appears frequently and isn’t defined as a keyword, you have three options: ignore the word, change the word to an existing keyword, or add the word to your keyword meta tag. You really want to address this issue if the word appears more often than the keywords you’ve already challenged. If not, don’t worry, you can safely ignore it. On the other hand, if the work appears with equal or greater frequency than the keywords already defined, you will want to make a choice. Either one works.

Well that’s it. Pay attention to how keywords are used in your homepage title, description, and body and you’ll gain more exposure over time.