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When you have finished reviewing and updating your site, the content should be well marked up with heading, italic, and strong tags for emphasis; the copy should include lots of descriptive keywords and key phrases; and when applicable, those keywords and key phrases should by hyperlinked to other relevant pages on the site.

Including descriptive text and hyperlinks

Take extra care to ensure that the copy reads legibly and doesn’t have keywords haphazardly thrown into it. Avoid at all costs the appearance of keyword spamming, which is what happens when you list a bunch of keywords in a row with no context. All the keywords need to be logically embedded in the page copy.

For example, instead of listing the words shampoo, conditioner, deep conditioner, hair spray, hair products, hair treatments, hair accessories, and so on, write something like “At X company, we sell only the best hair products and hair treatments on the market. We offer all the best high-quality shampoos, conditioners, and deep conditioners, along with hair spray and hair accessories.”

Be sure to also include hyperlinks on the keywords to each of those product categories. If you feel stuck for different ways of presenting the content on the page, it’s okay to reuse some of the content and wording found elsewhere on the site just don’t go overboard. You could, for instance, use “X Company Your Online Shop for the Finest Hair Products, Treatments, and Accessories” in the title tag and then repeat “X Company is your online shop for the finest hair products, treatments, and accessories. We sell shampoo, conditioner, deep conditioner, hair spray, and more!” somewhere within the body of the page.

Embedding object and image descriptions

Another great SEO technique that attracts the attention of search engine robots and spiders involves using the HTML title and alt attributes to describe certain page elements and images.

You can add the HTML title attribute to several different tags, such as hyperlinks, tables, table cells, and table rows.

Adding keyword and description meta tags

Even though you may have had the best intentions of adding these valuable tags when you were building the site, you may have forgotten to put them into the head of all your pages or to have updated them with accurate and relevant information. You can add several meta tags to your code to assist with making the pages search engine friendly. However, two of them in particular can really help with site optimization:

Description: The description meta tag provides a brief description of the Web site’s products and/or services in 250 characters or less, including spaces and punctuation. This description is critically important because it is this text that often gets displayed when the URL appears as part of a search engine’s results listings.

Keywords: The keywords meta tag provides a list of the seven most important keywords and key phrases (1,024 characters, including spaces and punctuation) that visitors to the site might type into a search engine to find the Web site’s products and services. These keywords should be listed in order of importance and include any plural versions of keywords if visitors might search for both the singular and plural instances, such as ipod and ipods. The same goes for common misspellings of important keywords for any site, like callender, callendar, and calander for a site that sells calendars.

Keywords, unfortunately, are one of those tags that has been rendered almost completely useless by unethical SEO practitioners. Today, only one former search engine, Inktomi (which is now part of Yahoo!), still uses keywords in factoring search engine rankings. Whether you choose to include this meta tag in your code is up to you, but the prevailing thought is that as long as one search engine uses them, that’s enough to warrant including the keywords meta tag in your pages.

Remember too, that meta tags don’t appear anywhere on the Web page when viewed in the browser and that they are strictly used by search engine robots and spiders to index your site.

As with the other meta tags, try with your title tags to include a couple of keywords or key phrases near the front part while identifying the content on the page, but be careful not to simply list keywords. Keyword listing could be misinterpreted as spamming and could blacklist the domain from being indexed by search engines. Instead, each title needs to read like an enticing, informative sentence, not a laundry list.

Page titles can be any length up to about 70 characters. If your titles exceed this suggested length, any extra characters may be truncated in the title bar of some browsers, such as “Rockwood & Perry Fine Wine & Spirits offers fine wines, advice, accessories, direct imports . . .” instead of the full title as listed in the code. Still, for the extra bump that having well-written, keyword- rich, descriptive titles can do for your site rankings, seeing truncated titles in a browser’s title bar may not be such a critical issue.