Denver Search Engine Marketing-3 Steps to Improving Your Search Engine Rankings
by CORE Magazine
Post Holiday riddle. What do you get when you cross a web site with superb content with it target audience?Answer: Nothing good.Unless, that site is search engine friendly and well optimized.I would like to utilize this column as a forum to answer three of your most pressing search engine related questions.1. ) It is my understanding that search engines have historically expected tags to be the most important words on the page and this is widely abused. Is this the case and should I put my keywords in tags if they are used in the title tags? In the past it is true that tags have been very important in terms of SEO. While they do still play a role, its value has declined over the years. I typically only suggest using an tag when it makes sense to do so – in a heading setting. Do not use too many tags on a given page. If you do not want the text to be as large as the displays, then use a lesser heading tag. Also, do not place entire paragraphs into heading tags. Be sure to use them exclusively for headings. Proper use of the tags will not get you into any hot water. Use the tag that best represents the look you are going for. You should also not have too many occurrences of an tag on any given page, while you are likely safe with 2-3 instances, I typically recommend no more than once. 2.) We have a site map for Google and Yahoo. Can it be used to help us identify problems with our site and if so how do we use it for that purpose?(Note: I am assuming you are referring to an XML sitemap) If you log into Google’s webmaster tools, and ensure that the site is “verified” Google will display errors associated with your sitemap (such as 404’s etc). Here you can also set your preferred domain. I recommend setting it to display URL’s with the “www” version only (using the non-www version is also fine, but using the www version is slightly better as most inbound links will likely use the www version.). By using just one version, you can help focus page rank and site rankings, and help to reduce the duplicate content problems associated with www and non-www versions being visible at the same time.3.) Our main pages seem to be in the regular results, but many of our pages are in the supplemental results. (These pages seem to be linked to database search results).Supplemental results will only achieve rankings when VERY specific searches are performed and limited resources are relevant to the search. Typically pages achieve supplemental status if they have very limited content, are very ad heavy, or have a large number of outbound links. Pages can also receive supplemental status when they simply do not meet the high standards of other highly relevant pages within your own site. Google would rather rank the most relevant page of your site, and if the now supplemental page has less relevant content, the other page will rank instead.
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CORE is the largest online resource for Denver Search Engine Marketing. Visit their website at: http://www.core-media.org/
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