Quick Tip: You can also find additional information in our quick start guide: Making the most of your website.
By choosing one main keyword or phrase for each page on your website, you can encourage search engines to associate the page with that phrase.
What you need to do: List all of the search terms that you want to attract visitors with, then try to match each one to the most appropriate page on your website.
Example: If you want to attract visitors who search for "red leather handbags", choose that as the key phrase for the page that has most information about red leather handbags.
Quick tip: Add TrafficDriver, in your control panel, for advanced keyword tools.
If your keyword/phrase appears too often, search engines may consider the page to be spam. Too rarely and the word/phrase doesn't feature highly enough to be associated with the page.
What you need to do: Look for opportunities where you can easily include the keyword/phrase in the page's text. Each time your keyword/phrase can be seen on the page, it counts towards your keyword density. This includes the title and navigation.
When you rewrite the text, remember that it still needs to make sense to the person reading it.
Don't forget, TrafficDriver offers you keyword and ranking reports that show how well your site is being indexed for particular keywords.
Quick tip: You can calculate your page's keyword density using Word or OpenOffice Writer's word count feature.
Step 1: Highlight everything on your web page and copy it to the clipboard.
Step 2: Paste your web page's content into a blank document in your word processor.
Step 3: Remove any images that have been pasted into the document and perform a word count.
Step 4: Count every instance of your keyword/phrase. A phrase counts as one instance, even though it has more than one word.
Step 5: Divide the page's word count by the number of times your keyword/phrase appears. The number you're left with is your page's keyword density.
Example: If your page has 100 words and "red leather handbags" appears six times, you have a keyword density of 6%.
The purpose of an <h1> tag isn't to tell web browsers to use a large, bold font: it's to tell browsers that this is the most important text on your page. Because the text is important, web browsers will display it in a large, bold font; the styling is almost a side-effect.
It''s not only web browsers that use HTML tags. Search engines decide which words and phrases are the most important on your page, based on the tags you use.
Which HTML tags are important? Experts identify a number of tags that search engines take notice of, in order of importance:
Note: Using these tags will effect the way that web browsers display your website. CSS allows you to change the way that web browsers display them.What you need to do: Reconsider how you use HTML tags in your page. Remembering that your design is important and that the page should still make sense to the visitor, you should aim to rewrite your web pages to show search engines which words are most important.
What you need to do: Meta tags are very easy to add your web pages. Most web design software will have an option to put them in your page. If you use a text editor, simply add them into the <header> section of your HTML.
The most important meta tags are "keywords" and "description".
Keywords: Another opportunity to include your keyword/phrase and any associated words/phrases.
Description: Often used to describe your web page in search results lists. Also allows you to present your keyword/phrase to the search engine again.
Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="red leather handbag, handbags, handbag, leather, red, accessory" />
<meta name="description" content="Everything you need to know about red leather handbags" />
Quick tip: TrafficDriver Extreme includes personalised and detailed meta-tag advice.
The next step to boosting is your search engine rankings is to install TrafficDriver on in your control panel. TrafficDriver submits your site every month to hundreds of search engines, including a guaranteed Google listing, and options for personalised telephone consultation and detailed reports.