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Contractor Web Design: Setting Your Site Up To Succeed, Part 2

Yesterday I talked about two key elements to keep in mind when laying out your site for the first time, or making any changes to it. I am not going to get to geeky here. I am just going to touch on the high points, but getting this right can really help your search results.

The two key elements are:

Search engines neither like nor dislike your site; their function is to simply serve the most relevant result to the surfer’s query.

To do this, search engines continually scour the net trying to find the most helpful, easy-to-understand, information rich websites that ALREADY get traffic for the particular search request, and are linked to by other relevant websites.

I told you that today I would talk about three components of site design to consider to rank well for your given keyword.

They are:

Your title tag
Keywords
Description

1. Meta Title – The “Title” of your homepage of your site should be short (65 characters including spaces) and keyword rich, including the keyword you want the site ranked for. Keywords should be used logically, don’t just stuff them in there. Including the primary keyword in the H1 header tag can really help boost results.

2. Meta Keywords – The Meta keywords should be the most searched for words and phrases for your site’s topic. Include no more than 20 keywords separated by commas with no spaces.

3. Meta Description – Each search engine displays their own max number of characters (Google 160, MSN 200, Yahoo 165) so keep this short. This is what will be displayed to readers in their search results on the topic they searched for. Again, make sure this section is logically packed with the appropriate keywords to the primary function of your site.

Most website templates today allow you easily integrate these 3 elements into your design, so updating these fields if you already have a site online should be easy.

Picture Credit: Xelcise