Web page promotion tricks and techniques for designers!

Designers - Promote your web site pages to the top of the search engine and directory listings, using these simple page promotion tricks and techniques.

We'll tackle the major promotion tricks as a series of quick fire paragraphs, but first consider these fast stat recommendations we regularly read in the marketing newsletters:

• Keyword meta tag = 1 to 3 major keywords, and/or 1 major keyword phrase
• Page TITLE = 5 to 8 words max
• Description meta tag = 25 words max
• H1 Heading should match page title
• 1st paragraph, should be 'very similar' to description meta text
• Max number of keyword repetitions on page = 7 max (each)
• Distribute keywords as follows - 4 in top third of page content, 3 in bottom two thirds
• All keyword instances must appear in first 7500 characters on page

Got that?

They're actually a reasonable set of figures to build your site too, but remember , there's no definitive set of figures that will please all of the search engines, as their ranking criteria are inherently different.

So bearing THAT in mind, here goes:

Prime every web page with relevant META tags

There are many meta tags that you can put into your web pages, but the important two (in order) are:

<meta name="keywords" content="1 or 2 keywords and/or a keyword phrase separated by commas">

Don't go mad with these, if you can sum what your page is about in a few words, then you probably have your keywords or keyword phrase. Putting in words that turn up only once in the content is a waste of time, and unfortunately because of this reason, some search engines are placing the keyword meta tag, further down the list of ranking criteria.

<meta name="description" content="A descriptive paragraph of your page containing the keywords from the meta tag above.">

The descriptive paragraph needs to be readable, as this will display below your page TITLE and link in the some search engine results field. Force the important points of each page into the first sentence and try to use the most important keywords/phrases as the first few words, without it looking silly of course! Use 25 words or less!

The following search engines ignore the meta-description tag:FAST, Google, Lycos & Northern Light. In addition, these four AND Excite, ignore the meta-keyword tag too.

Add a promotional comment to your page!

<!-- Comments made in this format, are read by the Inktomi search engine. If you put a keyword laced, paragraph of text as a comment at the top of your page, it won't be displayed by the browser, but may help your keyword weighting (The number of times the keyword appears on the page) and keyword relevancy (Positioning of keywords in the page, paragraphs, titles, alt tags etc.) scores.

<TITLE>Your page title </TITLE>

Use your keywords in the first few words if possible. Grab your readers attention. Be snappy and to the point!. Five to eight words max. This is the important line of text that will tell someone reading search results, as to whether YOUR page is the one they should be visiting. The TITLE has to satisfy the search engine requirements AND the human needs too, so spend time on it and get it right!

<H1>Page Headings</H1>

Search Engines look for Heading tags, so treat them the same as the title. Put keywords at the start of the heading, and try to make it descriptive. Don't want big font headings on your page? You don't have to! Use stylesheets to force the <H1> tags to have the same formatting as your normal paragraphs or other text. That way your heading could be a complete paragraph of text (if you really wanted), the search engines are satisfied, and the text flows in visually with the rest of the page too!

First paragraph!

Same again! Use keywords and keyword phrases early on in the first sentence if possible, then ensure your major keywords appear somewhere in this important paragraph. Remember the higher in the page the better your relevancy score. Make this readable and try to encapsulate the point of the page in the first few sentences, as this is the text that will display in search listings for engines that DON'T read meta description tags.

Other paragraphs!

Now show some restraint. You don't want to spam the spider! Use keywords only within the normal context of the information you are presenting. Don't just force them in for the sake of it. There needs to be a balance of words like any other form of writing.

Image <ALT> tags.

Use the ALT attribute of your image tag to apply keyword enhanced descriptions of the image, or just plain sneaky text! Unless they're obviously a link, many people won't mouseover them anyway! If you haven't met your quota of keyword repetitions, use these tags to do it. If you don't want to put an image in, use a 1 x 1 pixel transparent gif, that no-one will notice, and stuff the keyword onto that, placing it near the top of your page. Alt tags are read by AltaVista, Go, Google and Lycos. Excite, Fast, Inktomi and Northern Light ignore them though.

More details on search engine promotion can be found in our business information pages, where we discuss, how designers prepare and promote client sites. We also discuss many other techniques for promoting sites for free, some of which may be relevent to your site.

Finally, here are our design tips on how to help search engines index framed sites which you may find useful.