subject: SEO and Baking A Cake [print this page] SEO and Baking A Cake SEO and Baking A Cake
What does Search Engine Optimization and baking a cake have in common? Quite a bit, actually. Both require the proper ingredients to come out right and consumable.
When you start talking about Search Engine Rankings, some people just nod, glassy eyed and hand you their checkbook. Others think you're going to reveal some super secret to higher rankings.
There is no super secret, and no magic. There are only people who understands what needs to be done and do it, and those who don't.
If you don't know what to do and how to do it, then what other alternative do you have, except to just sit at the backend of the search results and hope for the best. That is a loser's attitude, and you will get nothing that way.
Just like a cake requires certain elements to actually come out a cake, there are key elements of every website that you must carefully craft, for it to come out on top. Some of these key elements are your domain name, page title, description tag, and proper use of keywords. I know that some of you are going to say, "Sure, everybody knows that." No they don't.
Take the description tag for example. Do you think that everyone with a website knows what the description tag is or what is its purpose? Hardly. If they did, then why do you see so many sites with the description tag empty or totally missing?
Case In Point.
I was just talking to a friend, who had paid a tidy sum of money to an SEO firm to produce a report on his business website, and what he could do to make it more search friendly, to get higher organic ranking. I took a look at his site, and his page titles are out of sorts with his pages, and not one page on his site has a description tag. So not every one knows how important the description and title tag can be. Now he wants to pay more to fix it. If he had the understanding of what to do in the first place, he could have saved himself a good wad of green.
It is called a description tag for a reason. It is used to describe the contents of the page. Every page must have a description and title tag, and they must be relevant to that specific page. Your title tag should not be more than 70 characters long and your description tag, no longer than 160 characters, including spaces.
Your description tag goes between the head tags in the body of your html document. It should be descriptive of the contents of that specific page and should also incorporate some of your keywords as naturally as possible. The Search Engines generally will pick up this description tag and use it in their search returns. This is what the person doing the search will read and by reading it, may or may not decide to visit your site.
There is more to be said about the description tag and all the other basic elements of your web page. Configuring them properly will help your rankings in the search engines, which will bring you more visitors, and in turn, more customers ($$$), if that is what you're after.
See more at http://www.trafficnet.co/Best SEO Practices/
