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Optimize the pages of your web site
Part 3, Optimize the pages. This step is as much an art as a science. It works best when your web site has a theme tied to a single keyword. As I did not learn this lesson until several years after creating MedLawPlus.com®, I violated this rule. The professional services RFP system was the thing for which the web site was created. Later, the legal forms system was created and engrafted it on to the existing web site. Search engine optimization would have gone better had I split the legal forms system off into a separate web site. Very difficult problem to fix at this point. The following are tips on organizing individual pages to optimize search engine results for a given search term.
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- URL Name. The most important element to page optimization is putting the search term into the URL. For example, the home page for Medlawplus.com® legal forms system is www.medlawplus.com/legalforms/. The closer to the route the term appears, the better. Thus, a URL of www.legalforms.com would be best for search term "legal forms".
- Meta tags. The title meta tag is second most important factor to page optimization after URL name. Below are first five lines of HMTL code for this web page:
<![CDATA[
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD
HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Optimize the pages of your web site</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Optimize the pages
of your web site.">
]]>
Make your title short, crisp and contain your target keyword. The target keyword for this page was "optimize web site".
- "Description" meta tag. I always add a "description" meta tag (fifth line of code above). It should contain a sentence or two describing the page--make sure the keyword is contained within the description. Why is it important? If you have done a good job with optimization and links causing your web page to be highly ranked in search engine results, what the search engine user sees are your title and description meta tags. Essentially, the description meta tag is a short advertisement for your page on search engines that must induce the search engine users to click on your listing. Make your description appealing to the target customer.
- First words of content. Look at the very top of this page. The first words of the content for this page contain our keywords and are the same as the title. It is important to place your keywords at the very beginning of the page content after one closes the <head> section and begins the <body> section of the HTML code for the page in question.
- Use of keyword in body of page. The more times your keyword appears in the body of the page the better. However, don't go crazy with this. Google tests each page to look for keyword spamming. How much keyword repetition is too much? I have no idea.
- Dynamically created pages. Dynamically created pages are those that pull content out of the database and place it onto the page. That's a standard practice and nothing wrong with it from an SEO standpoint. The problem occurs when the URL is also dynamically created through use of variables. For instance, "www.medlawplus.com/professionals/profile.htm?id=pauljones". This a dynamic URL in that the page "profile.htm" will change its content based upon the "id" variable. There are 1700 professionals registered with MedLawPlus.com®. Thus, if our site was organized in this fashion, "profile.htm" would have 1700 different looks when associated with each different professional "id" variable. This is a bad idea from an SEO standpoint. First off, search engines will only track one variable in a URL. Never go more than one variable deep in the URL. Secondly, a dynamic URL is penalized in the google pagerank system and rarely is assigned a PR value higher than 1. For example, I have created a separate profile page (with its own URL) for each of the 1700 professionals in MedLawPlus.com®. This was done to maximize page rank value for each of these pages.
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