Search Engine HTML Optimization Tips



Getting Results

Optimizing your Web page for search engines (like Yahoo!, InfoSeek, Google, and AltaVista) makes your Web site appear higher on the search results when they type in a keywords, like "lds mission."

Some search engines are ranked by hand, others by computer, and others require you to pay--the more you pay, the higher you appear on the results.

In most cases you can manipulate your Web page to be "search engine friendly"--meaning your page appears to be the "best " for a particular search term. For example, if someone typed in "Alaska mission" as a search term and your Web site contained the words "Alaska" and "Mission" in several places in your site, you would get ranked higher in the search results.

Be warned, however, that even though you litter your page with search terms, Search engines may "black book" you. It is important that your search terms appear in relevant parts of your site--headlines, body copy, links, alt tags, etc. Just filling up a landing page with search terms is manipulative and search engines are very wary of those tactics.

For a list of the terms most used to find mission Web sites, check out the usage statistics and scroll down to "Search Engine Results"

Optimization Tips:


1. Make sure every image has an <alt> tag containing the search terms

Example: <img height="10" width="10" src="img/official.gif" border="0" alt="search, html, optimization">


2. Make sure the search words appear in both the keyword <meta> tag as well as in the body of the text


3. The number of times a certain word (i.e. Mission) appears in the text also helps


4. The formatting also makes a difference. If the search term (i.e. LDS Mission) happens to be included in the text as an <H1> tag, it will get picked up as more important.


5. Make sure your page <title> contains the search terms (i.e. Alaska Anchorage LDS Mission Web Site for Alumni)


6. The position of the search terms in a sentence also make a difference (i.e. "LDS Alumni site for Alaska Anchorage Mission" would work better than just "Alaska Anchorage Mission" because the search term "LDS" happens to be first in the sentence, and therefor more important)



Page Author: Derek Hansen - Send Feedback
Last Updated: Thu Sep 5 11:41:00 2002