techniques

These simple and easy-to-follow techniques will help you get your site to be SEO/SEM friendly.

These first 3 need to be placed with the HEAD tags of your site. After the <head> and before the </head>

1. Title: The most important thing you can do to SEO/SEM your site is to provide a clear and distinct title for each individual page on your site. Place some of the most important keywords in the title while keeping it as a coherent phrase. Try and keep the length of the title less than 65 characters.
<title>your title goes here</title>

2. Keywords: provide a distinct set of keyword phrases for each page. A phrase is a set of 2-3 words that describe an aspect of that page. Keep the list to 10 items or less, and seperate each phrase by a comma.
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword phrase 1, keyword phrase 2, and so on">

3. Description: provide a 1-2 sentence description distinctly describing each page of the site.
<meta name="description" content="a descriptive sentence goes here">

This next item is a listing of all of the pages on your site. Provide a link to this XML file somewhere that is accessible from every page on your site.

4. Sitemap. Many people have added sitemaps to their site, but they are meant to be useable by people, not the googlebot. To make the sitemap useful to the googlebot, you need to use an XML sitemap. There are various references on the Internet, and a link on the footer of this site that show you the proper format of an XML sitemap.

These next 4 pertain to content on each page.

5. Keyword density: from your list of keywords in #2, each page should have 5-7% of its content words as keywords. You will have to manually count the words or copy and paste them into your word processing program to get the total.

6. Crosslinking: Link words on each page to other pages on your site, so that Google will recognize that each page is as important as any other on your site.

7. Alt tags: Googlebot cannot tell what you write inside of an image. If your menu is image-based, like most are, Google will not be able to effectivle parse your site. Placing a ALT Tag inside of an image will tell Google what that image says, and its a great place to stick some important keywords.
<img src="/image.jpg" alt="cats with party hats">

8. Additional text only menu. Place a text only navigational menu at the bottom of the site to aid the Googlebot and to provide more Crosslinks