|
May 2002 Search Engine Tips
Keyword Placement Part I
The Title Bar I'm going to take this slowly
because the placement of keywords is so important. This article is
actually a homework assignment for you if you have a website now. Go to
every important page in your website and see if you have what this
article suggests. In future issues we'll cover different parts of your
web page where you can strategically place keywords.
One of the main places that a search engine looks for the keywords is in
the "Title Bar" of your web page. The title bar is usually a blue bar
across the top of each one of your webpages. It's actually at the very
top of your browser window or most likely the top of your screen when
you browser is at full size.
The information in the title bar is also the link text
that someone clicks on when they receive the results of a search AND it
is also the text used when someone "bookmarks" your site or puts it in
their favorite places (many browsers allow the person bookmarking the
webpage to change the text that they see in their list of bookmarks).
If you look at the title bar of this page, you'll see that it says
"Great Internet Marketing." Although the keywords "Internet Marketing"
are in the title, it doesn't matter too much for this page because this
page is in a private paid membership site. It's password protected and
not designed to be found by search engines.
A problem I see all the time is where people put their name in the title
bar or use "home page." All of this is meaningless. What you want to do
is put keywords in the title bar.
Tip: Go though your website and make sure each page has keywords in the
title bar. Using keywords in the page title tells someone what's on that
page. If you look at my home page, for example,
http://www.antion.com , it
does not say, "Hey this is the big shot speaker Tom Antion." My keywords
in the title bar say "presentation skills," "speeches," or "public
speaking."
Use something relevant to the search engines and your
topics. The title bar is weighted very heavily when the search engine is
looking for the page. It's just about the most important / relevant part
of your page when it comes to search engines. If the search engine is
doing a search on the term "public speaking" and it's not in the Title
Bar, which is the most important part of the page, the search engine
figures the page is not about public speaking and most likely skips
looking at the rest of the page. The title tag
The HTML code that behind the scenes of your page is called the "Title
Tag." It should be the first tag beneath the head tag as shown below.
<head>
<title>Great Internet Marketing</title>
</head> You could easily see this same coding in
your Internet Explorer browser by clicking on "View" then "Source." If
you are in Netscape, click "View" then "Page Source" You can't look
behind the scenes HTML coding using the AOL browser.
Folks, this is very important. Make sure your keywords are in your Title
Bar and check it for every important page of your site. Also remember
that pages on different subjects should have different keywords in the
title bars of your web pages. Back to May 2002 Index page
|
