Optimizing your site? Here are a few handy tips.

Optimizing your website pages is essential to see an increase of traffic. Here are a few handy tips which are really simple and can be implemented by anyone with very little knowledge of HTML coding. If, however, you do not know any HTML coding, then ask your webmaster to help you.

Firstly, you have to optimize every single page of your site with a specific keyword. This keyword should relate to the content on any specific page you are optimizing. Start with your homepage, choose a keyword or key phrase that best describes the content on the page, and use that keyword to optimize the page.

Tip: Keywords are the words people use when doing searches in search engines. By including keywords in your site content, your site will be returned as a search result when people search for the specific keyword you optimized your pages for.

Let’s start optimizing…

Section one:

The TITLE Tag is the most important part of any page and is located just below the <head> or header tag. It may look something like this:

<title>Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization SEO South Africa</title>

The title tag should not contain ’stop’ words like ‘and’, ‘not’, ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘about’, etc. These are common words mostly ignored by Search Engines. They add no value at all.
By adding your chosen keyword to the Title tag, you add weight to the page and increase the relevancy of the keyword to the page.
Do not include your company name or the name of your website in the Title tag. It will simply reduce the weight of your keyword.

Section two:
Meta tags are very important aspect of your page and should always be optimized. The Meta tags we will be looking at are the Description and Keywords tags, which should be added below the Title tag. They look like this:

The Meta Description tag is very useful as this is what is displayed in the Search Engine search results when a search is conducted. Apart from the title, the description is what will explain what a page or website is about.

Tip: Try to write a description that relates to the content of the page you are optimizing and make sure your keyword is added once into it. Write a simple piece of text that makes sense when you read it.

The Meta Keyword tag should have your keyword or keyword phrase added, preferably, at the beginning of the tag. Usually more than one keyword (with variations) is added to the tag separated by a comma.

Section three:
Every site has content, or text, giving the visitor an idea as to what you are about. Optimizing the content of your site is most important. The content of the site is displayed in the BODY of your HTML or between the <body> and </body> tags.

Top optimize the content of your site, add some of these tips:

Make sure your keyword appear in bold (<b>keyword</b>) at least once on your page. Search engines will think that this word is important and must be relevant to the search done by the search engine user.
Do not repeat your keyword to many times in the content. By repeating it too many times, the search engines will think you are trying to SPAM them. Make sure that your text reads well.
Make use of header/heading tags (<h1>keyword</h1>, <h2>keyword</h2>, <h3>keyword</h3>) and put your keyword into them. Add your keyword as close to the top of the page as you can and remember to not overdo it. Do not repeat the same keyword in several heading tags. My suggestion is to do it once only.
Another good place to add your keyword is the image “alt” tag. Image ALT tags can be used to increase the weight of your keyword on the page. Add your keyword along with a good description that relate to the image in the ALT tag. Image tags look like this:
<img src=”imagename.png” width=”200px” height=”100px” alt=”description with keyword added here”>
Your keyword should appear at the beginning of your content and at the end (The first and last 50 words)

These are just simple ways to help you optimize your site and increase the number of visitors to it. Hopefully you can make your site more friendly by applying these tips.

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