Web Site Design Articles

Preparing Your Site for Search Engines©

Identify Key Phrases for your site

If you were looking for information similar to the information on your site, how do you search for information and resources on the web? What key phrases and key words would you search?  Would you tend to use phrases or words (this depends on the uniqueness of your information and how many potential meanings your key words might invoke.

These are the words and phrases on which you should then concentrate when developing your own meta tags and key words and phrases.

Take the KatsueyDesignworks site as an example. The services we offer help people by offering professionally designed web sites, provide hosting services, webmaster services and tons of web development information and tutorials. KatsueyDesignWorks also offers e-commerce solutions, marketing, teaching seminars and site content development.  How might somebody search for the type of information we offer?  They would typically use key phrases such as...

- web site design or website design
- web site development
- training, education, tutorials
- e-commerce, selling
- webmaster, web hosting

Examine your site and make a list identifying the key words and phrases a potential client might use when searching for the type of information your site carries. After all, if they're looking for certain services and products and you offer then you stand a much better chance of getting the sale because your prospect is pre-qualified.  The number of hits on a site doesn't bring in the money unless of course your site is really in the business of selling advertisement.

Name Site Pages Appropriately

Now that you have a list, your next task is to craft appropriate page titles for each page on your site. This is the place where many site designers make a mistake. They either forget to give pages a  title or create pages for the visitor, not the search engine.  Ensure your page titles contain the most important key words and/or phrases for the specific page and for your site overall.


Create Meta Tags (note, meta tags no longer have the same significance they did at the time of this article.)

There are two important places where these phrases need to appear.  The first place is within the first 250 words of your page. But remember, you need to be clever enough to use the key words and phrases in sentences that also mean something to your visitors.  Search Engines frequently only search the first 250 to 400 words of a site to determine site content. The higher your "key phrase density" (the number of times the words are used within the 250 to 400 words read by the search engine without Spamming) the better your ranking in many search engines.

The next place to use your key phrases is in your meta tags. This  HTML code helps the search engines, indices and directories properly classified and indexed your page.  There are two types of meta tags - those words that describe your site and its key then a key phrase tag describing your site while using as many key words and still making sense.  This last phrase is used by many search engines to describe your site to others.

<meta name="keywords" content="web development,web design,website,web site,design,website design,graphic, graphics>

This is an example of what your key phrase tag should look like, using your site content to develop the phrase. 

<meta name="description" content="KatsueyDesignWorks is a full service web site development company, offering services as a custom web designer, web hosting, web master and Internet marketing. We do HTML, graphics and javascripting.">

Search engines' rules and ranking procedures change often. Why, because unfortunately there are groups of people who are more interested in steering people to their site whether they want to be there or not, just to obtain page hits for advertising purposes.   However, generally speaking if you include your key words and phrases in the page content, title, and meta tag descriptions, you'll have the best chance of obtaining and maintaining a high ranking as long as your site also contains the information you use in these tags, titles and descriptions.

This article is the copyright material of KatsueyDesignWorks© and may not be reprinted without express permission of the author, Peggie Brown.

If you need a great business web site, KatsueyDesignWorks is the place to start - and end - your search for a web site designer.

We provide:

• Custom Designs
• Custom Graphics
• CSS
• Search Ready
• Great Service
• Economical Prices
• Modern Browser Compliant