Be Found.   Be Seen.  Be Noted.

The first rule when writing or editing the copy for a website is: write for your users, not for the search engines. After all, the human visitors are the ones you are talking to, not the search engine spiders. The human visitors are the only ones who will purchase anything on your site; writing copy artificially stuffed with keywords will shatter their confidence and scream “spam” – to them as well as to the search engine spiders.

With this in mind, optimizing the site copy for search engines is a far cry from simply stuffing your keywords as many times as you can. It is a careful blend of art, experience and science. Many factors have an impact on your site's rankings. Some factors matter more or less, some factors are more or less within your control, some are more permanent, some are more fluctuating, etc. When delivering our recommendation report, based on your target keywords (see keyword discovery), we examine (among others) the following factors for each page:

• Html title tags; these tags carry a strong weight for search engines. The page titles are also used by search engines to link to each result page – titles are the first thing users see about your site when they browse the results for their query on the search engine. Titles should be written very carefully, both to describe the page appropriately to search engines (who use them when they index the page), and to catch the attention of search engine users.
• Headers, italics, bold faces are also given more weight than regular text.
• Alt tags on images; since search engines cannot read images, meaningful alternate text should be provided for each image.
• Word order is important (the search terms a b will match better a page that contains “a b” than a page that contains “b a”).
• Words in the domain name itself have a heavy weight.
• Words in the URL (after the domain name) also have some limited weight.
• Word proximity is important (i.e. the search terms a b will match better a page that contains “a b” than a page that contains “a c b”.
• Plurals and word endings are important (i.e. the search term “widgets” may match a page that contains the word “widget” singular only, but, all other things being equal, a page that contains the plural “widgets” will rank higher).
• Keywords used in external links towards your site are used for indexing as well, and have a heavy weight; this is how George Bush’s biography comes first for the search terms “miserable failure”.
• Meta tags (especially meta-keywords and meta-description) vary in importance according to the search-engine, but usually have a limited impact. However, writing well-targeted meta-tags is part of a successful search engine optimization campaign.

A part of a successful search engine optimization campaign is to optimize all the page factors as well as possible. BeNoted will provide a detailed list of suggestions for improving every possible page element on your site.

See also: Site-Level Optimizations, Off-Site Optimizations.