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How do I make sure my page is optimized for Google?

A better question is: Why wouldn't I want my page to be optimized for Google?!

Let's be honest. It's hard to get great position on Google. The more competition for placement the harder it is. If you want to rank well for something that nobody searches for, it's pretty easy. If you want to rank well for Hannah Montana Concert Tickets you'd better do everything right. Ignoring simple steps, like meta tags or keyword density will almost guarantee you won't be found at the top of the search results.

There are several important steps you need to follow to make sure your site is Google (and Yahoo) friendly.

• TITLE. A good <title> tag. The title tag should be relevant to the content on the page. This means that the TITLE should describe what the page is about. A good title should contain xx characters (including spaces).


• DESCRIPTION. A good <meta description> tag. The description tag is the text that is displayed in the search engine result (under the title tag). This is a longer sentence that describes what the page is about. It should not exceed 200 characters. The description tag contents may not always be displayed in the search results. Often the search engines will display portions of your page's content which contain words used in the search query.


• KEYWORDS. Google doesn't look the keyword tags (they prefer to scan the page and determine the keywords based on the content of the page). Yahoo and other search engines do look at keywords, so it would be crazy to not use them. You should limit your keyword tag to 8 words. Do not used words like 'and' or 'or'. They are ignored by most search engines. Remember, the keyword tag is for search engine use and it's not read by people, so it needs to only contain the keywords you think people will search for when looking for your page. The keywords need to be relevant to the content on the page.


• CONTENT. Content is king. You've probably heard that before. The days of writing garbage and hoping the search engines will rank you high are over. You need to write good content and you need to be sure that the keyword to content relevancy is high. At least 90%. This means that the keywords should describe what the content is about. Maybe this means that you populate the keyword tags after you have written the content.