Optimize Your Web Pages

Keywords

Define keywords for your page and use them. Keywords are short, concise, and specific. Use them as you would when you search for items on the Internet or as you would do to find your page's "product". Include, oddly enough, misspelled, capitalized and plural keywords. Do not use "stop words" -- particles like "and", "the", "a", "an", etc.

Note: Do not confuse keywords in this section with the meta keywords tag.

<title></title>

The HTML title tag is the most important part of your web page. It should appeal to search engines and people and should interest the reader. It should describe the content of your web page in one sentence or less. It is likely to be used in search engines' results, bookmarks and browser title bars. It is the first thing a search engines' spider sees on your page. Place the title tag (<title>) directly after the opening head tag (<head>).

Note: Do not repeat the same keyword in your <title> more than twice; it's considered spam.

<meta name="description" />

The meta description tag describes your site's content, giving search engines' spiders an accurate summary filled with multiple keywords. The meta description tag should contain multiple keywords organized in a logical sentence. Place the keywords at the beginning of your description and close to each other (proximity) to achieve the best possible rankings.

Note: Do not use exact words or phrases more than once; variations of capitalization / lowercase are not the same. For example, the string "Example" is not the same as "example".

<meta name="keywords" />

A meta keyword tag lists all the keywords for which you would like search engines to rank your site. List them in order of importance or relevance. List up to twenty but don't overdo it.

Note: Do not use exact words or phrases more than once; variations of capitalization / lowercase are not the same. For example, the string "Example" is not the same as "example".

<body></body>

Page content is the second most important area of a web page when optimizing for search engines. Include grammatically correct and appropriate content tags such as header tags (<h1>-<h6>), strong tags (<strong>), emphasis tags (<em>) and other tags to designate content differences. Do not use HTML tags for stylizing; use CSS for presentation and styles. Search engines tend to give a bit more weight to keywords found in these tags. The logic is that if the web site creator thought they were important enough to highlight, they're more likely to represent key content for that page.

Note: Items here refer to standardized HTML tags. While CSS is very useful in designing and preferred for presentation, keep in mind that specialized tags that create specialized styles will not necessarily be beneficial in search engine optimization. For example, a CSS class defined as ".strong" does not translate as HTML <strong>.

Hypertext Markup Language Source Code for Search Engines Optimization

<html>
   <head>
      <title></title>
      <meta name="description" content="Your site's summary here.">
      <meta name="keywords" content="Your site's keywords here">
   </head>
   <body>
   ...
   </body>
</html>

Folders and File Names Conventions

Use hyphens / dashes, not underscores for naming folders and file names when used as word separators. Additionally, use only lower case letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and hyphens (-) as a rule of thumb for naming convention for folders and file names.

Note: use <title>, <meta description>, <meta keywords>.
Note: use alt tags describing all images / objects.
Note: incorporating HTML comment tags () may be beneficial for search optimization.
Note: spiders "read" pages similar to how most users read pages; top-down / left-right. Organize page structure semantically.