internet promotion: search engine promotion - hosting, development and design at ASA, International, Inc.

Most people make the mistake of using a page title that's good for people but lousy for the search engines. Big mistake. A title like "Bill Phillips - Real Estate Broker" is a disaster! The golden rule is this: All your most important keyphrases should be in the TITLE tag. So what you do is look at your keyphrases, make a list of all the important words, and create a title tag that uses them. Also, keep in mind that since browsers only display the first few words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So, while the first sentence of your title tag should be "human readable", the rest can be just a list of keyphrases.

There is some debate as to whether a very long title tag is a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to search engines. Some people are concerned that a very long title tag might result in the search engines deciding the page is a "spam page." Keep the title between 8 and 15 words. But you might want to try longer title tags on some of your pages, just to see what happens! So Bill Phillips might have a title that looks like this:

<TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Offices Office Space</TITLE>

The reason for this is that the three most important places to have keyphrases and phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You want them to all contain the same important words; this increases your keyphrase density and improves your rankings.

Step 3 - The Meta Tags

The fabled Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed.

Meta tags go in the <HEAD> section of the HTML page (the same section as the <TITLE> tag). The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web-page. Guess what? You've already written one for the <TITLE> tag! So just edit that to make it totally human readable (and perhaps a little shorter), and you're done. The format of a Meta description tag is simple. It looks like this:

<META name="description" content="whatever you want to place here">

So, in our example, we might use:

<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments, Commercial Property and Office Space">

Keep it between 75 and 150 characters.

The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your keyphrases, and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times or so. This may mean that you can't use some of your better keyphrases.

The reason why you don't want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. It isn't likely that this will happen if you exceed 5, but play it safe. The exception is common "noise" words like "the", "in", "a", "and" and so on. Most search engines ignore them. We'd leave them in just in case, but don't worry if you have more than 5 of any of them.

If you want to get really fancy, play the cunning comma trick. The reason you have commas in keyword meta tags is that some search engines use them; they consider the actual phrases as important in your ranking. Most search engines don't however; they just look at the words, and a comma is the same as a space to them. But even so, the fact that words are next to each other means something to them. So if you can put two keyphrases together with a comma between them, and the last words of the first keyphrase coupled with the first words of the next keyphrase make up one of your keyphrases, then you've gotten 3 keyphrases for the price of two! Normally, however, this is difficult, so don't waste too much time over it.

Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200 and 500 characters. Unfortunately, this means you may not be able to include all of your key phrases in your meta keywords tag. To deal with this, the trick is to remember that you can put different keyphrases on different pages on your site. So what you do is make your home page have general keyphrases, and then create different sets of meta keywords tags for your other pages that exclusively target more specific topics (such as "selling a home"; and the same goes for the titles and descriptions on those pages as well!). After doing that pruning, our sample keywords tag might look like this:

<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in wilmington north carolina,buying a house in new hanover county,buying a home in new hanover county,selling a house in new hanover county,renting a house in new hanover county,renting an apartment in new hanover county,house broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental">

Step 4 - The first paragraph

The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon everything in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your visitors, so you want to make a good impression.

Try to put this first paragraph as close to the <BODY> tag as possible. Avoid putting graphics or other HTML in front of your first paragraph as much as you can. We don't have a banner ad on my homepage for this reason. Also, use the <H1> or <H2> tag to emphasize your opening sentence (but make sure it looks tasteful!). Bill Phillips might use the following opening paragraph:

<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington, North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the last 10 years, We've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home, apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me to be your guide.

Step 5 - Putting it all together

Combining steps 1-4, we get some HTML that looks like this

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TItLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Offices Office Space</TItLE>
<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments and Commercial Property">
<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in wilmington north carolina,buying a house in new hanover county,buying a home in new hanover county,selling a house in new hanover county,renting a house in new hanover county,renting an apartment in new hanover county,house broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental"> </HEAD>
<BODY>
<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington, North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the last 10 years, We've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home, apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me to be your guide.

... rest of your html
</BODY>
</HTML>

Avoid Search Engine Tricks

Some "experts" advise trying to trick search engines by putting keyphrases in comments, putting them in text that is the same color as your background, and so on. We strongly advise that you not try these tricks. Bluntly, most of them don't work -- and the ones that do may stop working at any minute, as the search engines are constantly trying to detect and defeat them.

Got Links?

Once you have your pages up and running, and chock full of useful content, it's a very good idea to try and get other people to link to them. It's not enough to just get them in the search engines. There are three very good reasons for doing this: First, many search engines are now using

(how many other pages link to your page) as a ranking criteria -- they figure that if other sites link to your page, it might be useful. Second, it's recently been revealed that Wenktomi applies a ranking penalty to any URL submitted through their free "Add URL" system, but removes it if their spider also finds the page by following a link from another site (they do this in an attempt to find and penalize "doorway" pages). And third, you'll get traffic from the web sites that link to you.

Getting links isn't that hard. When you find a web site that has content similar to yours, e-mail the webmaster and ask for a link, pointing out why it would be appropriate. If he has content on his site useful to your visitors, link to him without even offering to trade links. Link to him, then e-mail him and ask for a link back.

A note about Framed sites

Many "experts" also say that using frames to construct your web site can hurt their rankings. As long as you construct your frames properly. The trick is this: make sure that your <frameset> page has a proper title tag and meta tags. Similarly, your subframe pages should have the same ingredients (perhaps with modified contents), as well as a little bit of javascript that "pops" the user to the proper framed presentation if they surf into the subframe page. Here's some sample javascript that works with just about every browser:

<BODY onLoad="if (top == self) top.location.href = 'http://www.yourserver.com/yourframe.html';">

What this does is, when the page is loaded, if it finds that it is not in a frame, it redirects the browser to the proper frameset URL, whatever that might be. A much more detailed explanation of how this can be done in various ways can be found in this excellent article.

Once you've got your pages configured, simply promote them all (the frameset page and the subframe pages) to the search engines. The MultiSubmitter tool, which you get access to by forking over $10 or more, makes this easy!

Checking your HTML

Almost all web sites have HTML errors, even those that appear to display nicely on your browser. Browsers do a pretty good job of being tolerant of errors, but even so, it's a good idea to make sure your HTML is as perfect as possible, as this increases the chance that your web site will display the way you want it to on as many browsers as possible (both past, present and future).

We strongly recommend that you use a HTML Validator to check your pages, and my favorite is the W3.org HTML Validator. While it is a little hard to use and unbelievably picky (good!), it's by far the best We've found -- and given that it's written by the folks that define what HTML is, it does the job right. One thing to be aware of with this tool is that a single error can cause a cascade of error messages, so We typically fix the first error reported, then revalidate.