Building your web pages search engine friendly is easy once you’ve learned how. Once you’ve done this, you’re rank in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. will improve. It is pointless to build a website that visitors will be unable to find.

You want your website to get indexed on the first page of the search engine sites. All of the major search engines use programs that are called crawlers (that’s where the term “spider” comes from). They search for your keywords, long-tail keywords and meta tags. Keywords and meta tags tell them what your website is about. The more relevant your site is to the terms people are searching for, the higher your ranking with the search engine. Meta tags are a one line sentence. They give an overview of the entire web page.

So what are keywords? Keywords are the words you’ll chose to indicate the content of your website. Long tail keywords are a type of keyword phrase that has at least three, and sometimes as many as five words in the phrase. What is your website about? Your keywords will indicate that. For instance, what if the information and products you’re offering is about dogs. You will have the word “dogs” on your website. But that certainly won’t get you ranked high in the search engines. There are a lot of websites about dogs. So, you’ll want to get more specific. What about dogs? Are you breeding dogs? What kind? The more specific you can get, the better your keywords will be.

Long tail keywords are more descriptive than a single keyword. Using the “dog” example again, let’s say you are a dog breeder, and that you breed one type of dog, black labs. The long tail keyword would be something like this: “Black lab dog breeding service.” You noticed that I know nothing about dogs or dog breeding, didn’t you? But, you get my point. Research is important when choosing your keywords and long-tail keywords. Here are a few that I got doing a search:

Labrador Retriever Puppies for sale, Labrador Retrievers for sale, local Labrador Retriever breeders, local Labrador Retriever breeders, gun dogs, hunting dogs, local dog breederse, (they’re misspelling, not mine).

You can do a whole search on common misspelled words and add them to your keyword arsenal.

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. For the purposes of search engine friendliness, when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag. Here’s an example that I got from a search:

Labrador Retriever puppies for sale from local Labrador Retriever breeders. Information about Labrador

Retrievers as adult dogs as well as local gun dog and hunting dog breeders listed. Hopefully that gives you some ideas. Choose your keywords, long tail keywords and meta tags carefully. They can make you or break you when the search engines “spider” you. This article is getting long, so we’ll talk about placement of your keywords next time.

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Marilyn Parmelee is a published author, pastor and internet marketer. She helps author’s, nonprofits, and small businesses develop a web presence.

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In the last article ‘Building “Search Engine Friendly” Web Pages, I talked about keywords, long tail keywords and meta tags. In this article, I’ll be talking about the placement of keywords on your website. Where you put your keywords makes a huge difference in getting your website noticed by the search engine spiders. As they crawl your website, they are looking for the words that describe what your site is all about, and use your keywords to make a determination for your sites relevance in what people are searching for. Just having your keywords on your webpage isn’t enough. It’s important to “tag” them. And don’t worry, if you don’t know HTML and use an HTML editor, it does it for you! Your job is to make sure you’re using your keywords.

Here are some of the tags you will need to use:

Title tags: Your title tag is where you place your primary keyword or keyword phrase. The sentence describes your business in less than 90 characters. It should include ONLY your main keywords. Title tags are very important, and look like this. primary keyword phrase here

Header tags: Header tags are as suggested by the title, the tags you put in your header. They look like this. Primary and/or Secondary keywords here The “1″ lets the search engine know this header is the most important header on the page.

Meta tags: These tags are the small descriptive text found underneath the title tag on the search engines results page. As with the title tag, you will want to keep these brief, informative, as well as up-to-date. Use meta tags on every page of your site, so that the search engine spiders know what a particular page is about at first glance. That way, they’ll know whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you’re making the search engines spider’s job easier. That will make them crawl and index your site more often.

Alt tags: These are used to provide a text description of a graphic. Be sure to provide a description of each graphic that is relevant to your page. It is best to add images that are actually named after your main keyword. For example, you could insert an image and call it “your keyword graphic1.jpg” and so on. Flash videos are great and can benefit your customers. However, keep in mind that search engine spiders only read text on your source code.

If you only present the important words in video and images, the search engines won’t have the information available to them. Keep the relevant words in text form. Make sure you are using your keywords, long tail keywords and meta tags to your advantage. Use the appropriate tags. Bold, underline, or italicized the keywords throughout the body. Place the keyword once at the very beginning of the copy, and once at the very end of the copy. This will help optimize your site and get it recognized by the search engines more quickly. I hope this has been of some help to you.

For more frugal ways to build your business, go to: [http://www.frugalebizproducts.com]www.frugalebizproducts.com. Check out the resources and products page for free ebooks on this subject.

Marilyn Parmelee is a published author, pastor and internet marketer. She helps author’s, nonprofits, and small businesses develop a web presence. To find out more go to [http://www.frugalebizproducts.com]http://www.frugalebizproducts.com.

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