http://www.paulpuente.com/tutorial_1.html American Local History Network – Optimizing Your Website Tutorial One – “Why isn’t my website listed when I do a search?” Joyce has already told you the disappointing results of an analysis I did last week when only 5 of the 50 ALHN websites appeared in the first 5 pages of a Google search. Assuming you don’t find your website in the first 5 pages of a Web search this is the most important question you can ask. Through a series of tutorials over the next few months I hope to help you answer this question and to improve your website so that it appears on the first page of search engine results. So, with that as a brief introduction let’s begin. Q. If I have my website on the Web doesn’t Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines automatically find it and include it in searches? A. The short answer to that question is No. You must “optimize” your website so that it meets the standards that these companies require for you to be listed. This series of tutorials will help you to improve your websites and optimize it for search engine listings. Q. How do search engines such as Google determine the rank order of websites on the results page? A. Another way of asking this is how I make sure my website winds up on the first page of search results. The simple answer is you can’t. All you can do is to focus on the key elements of your website that Google and the other engines think are important. Google explains this by saying they determine which websites are the most “useful and relevant” and then rank them accordingly. This means that search engines are constantly comparing your site to the others who have similar content. These are your competitors. They are constantly improving their sites and unless you follow suit you could fall further behind. Your goal is to have your site show up on the first two, ideally the first, pages of a search. People rarely go beyond the second page of results if they can’t find what they are looking for. Google uses over 200 factors in a complex algorithm (a mathematical process) to crunch these data and voila, out come the results, untouched by human hands. Most people don’t even know what most of these factors are and most are way beyond your control anyhow so there is no need to worry about them. But, experts generally agree that the following factors are ones you can control and influence.  Keyword usage  Site structure  Site speed  Time spent on site  Number of inbound links  Quality of inbound links In this first tutorial we will only deal with keywords and their usage and next time talk about site structure and after that the remainder of the topics. Q. What are keywords? A. These are simply the words that someone is most likely to use when searching for your website. But people don’t generally search for a specific website such as ALHN or Rootsweb, they search for information that will help them in their family history research. For example, someone searching for ancestors in Tennessee might use the words, “genealogy” and “tennessee” or perhaps “family history” and the name of the State or a county in the State. These then are the keywords that people use to help them find information. Your website must contain these keywords if your site is to be found by researchers. Q. Where are these keywords on my website? A. They must be in two places on each page in your website. Let’s take them one at a time and then explain why they absolutely must be in two places. HTML Meta Tags Resist the temptation at this stage to allow your eyes to glaze over. I must give you a little background if you are to fix your website for this one element. It is necessary if you are to understand what is on the “inside” or “underneath” each of your website pages. Hang in there with me because this is important. I’ll try not to use too many technical terms. For those of you who already know this topic I would urge you read it nonetheless because there are some issues that you may not know about. HTML, an acronym for Hypertext Markup Language the main language for creating web pages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser. It was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist working at CERN in Geneva. From that early beginning we have today the World Wide Web. Like any language it has its own vocabulary. For example <title></title> is one of many tags that are used in HTML. Think of it as a placeholder, a place where you put something that a browser understands and then puts it in the correct place on your web page. And yes, <title></title> actually contains the title of your website that is displayed in the top bar of all browsers. In the HTML page underneath your actual web page it would be entered as the following: <title>American Local History Network</title> This example assumes that you wanted this title for a particular page. You can have a different title for every page, in fact, this is desirable. Q. Okay Paul, why do I have to worry about this? Doesn’t the program I use to create my website automatically put in the title and all the rest of this HTML stuff? A. Some do and others don’t. Maybe there is a place in your program that asks you to do that, maybe it is hidden in the program settings and you haven’t found it. When I was analyzing your sites I found a number of cases where this <title> tag didn’t exist and if you want to improve your search results you must deal with this topic. Q. Okay, now I understand why it is important but the title of this section is called HTML Meta Tags but you have just used the term “tag”. So, what is a meta tag? A. Those of you who code your website line by line in html know where these tags are and why they are important. But if you use a program to build your website that hides all of this stuff from you then you may not know that there is even such a thing as a meta tag. Okay, so what is it? A meta tag is simply a text statement in the <head></head> tag (at the beginning) of your web page that gives information to search engines. You can think of it as an instruction to tell the engine to do something. The <head></head> tag and the meta tags that are contained within that tag are not visible to the person viewing your website but they are critically important. Q. But what does this have to do with keywords? A. Hang in there, we’re almost there. If you have never seen a meta tag before go to the main page of your website and right-click on an empty space on the page (not on a link or text) and on the submenu that pops up click “View source or View page source”. The window that opens contains all of the code that makes that page work. Go to the top to look at the <head> element. Right under that are all the meta tags. If you don’t see any or they are empty it could be one reason why your site doesn’t show up in the search rankings. I must emphasize that this could be only one reason, there are many others which we will discuss in future tutorials. The following are the critical tags and meta tags; your page may have others as well. <head> <title>ALHN Genealogy Research</title> <meta name="description" content="this is a description of your site"> <meta name="keywords" content="genealogy,family history,tennessee"> <meta name="author" content="Your name"> (optional) </head> Now it’s my time to ask the questions. Did you find meta tags in the head element? Did you have all of them and were they filled in properly? Did they have the correct quotation marks included. Quotation marks are not optional! If you don’t have the correct meta tags and want to edit them then first see if the program you used to create your site allows you to edit the underlying html code. If it does not you must open that page in an html editor. There are plenty of free ones that you can download, but the use of these editors is far beyond the scope of this tutorial. Now, we see where the first place that keywords appear. In my example I have only used 3 keywords: "genealogy,family history,tennessee". Notice that there is no space between individual key words but a space is used in a phrase such as “family history”. A comma is mandatory between individual words or phrases. It is unnecessary to capitalize proper nouns or any keyword for that matter. As mentioned already, the title is important because it is what shows up at the very top of a browser when the person opens it. It is also displayed on the tab of the page if the browser uses tabs. The title should describe that page but also be less than 100 characters. Make sure that the opening tag, <title> and the closing tag, </title> are in their appropriate positions. The description meta tag is what appears in the two line Google excerpt under the title and url on the search results page. Don’t sell this feature short. Many people use this description as the basis for their choice of search results rather than the title. It should be less than 200 characters although you will find a difference of opinion about what length is best and acceptable. Each web page should have a different description that reflects the content of that page. This is often overlooked and it is so very important. Body of the Web Page The second place where keywords must be used is in the text that is displayed when a person views your site. Each keyword or phrase used in the meta tag must exist on the associated web page. If they don't, many search engines will eliminate you for spamming. Q. How many keywords can I use? A. There is no set rule or limit, but generally 5 to 10 very specific and targeted words or phrases should be enough. If you use too many words some search engines will tag you as a spammer. Once again, make sure all of these words show up in the text on that page. Q. Can I use the same keywords on every page in my site. A. Yes, but you should include or sometimes exclude some words depending on the content of that page. For example, if your State home page shows a link to a county page then that county web page should have its name in the meta tag as well in the text of the page. Be guided by the content of each of your pages. Ask yourself, “what search words are people going to use to find this particular page?” Q. I’ve heard of keyword stuffing. What is it? A. It is a trick to gain visibility and ranking in search engine results by overloading (stuffing) a web page with repetitive keywords. Don’t do it. Some developers go so far as to include hundreds of words but not make them visible to the person viewing the page. Search engines will severely penalize sites caught stuffing keywords. Q. Are you going to finally tell me what are the best keywords to use on my site? A. I can give some that are logical but again I must emphasize that you should use keywords that are contained within the content of each page in your site. If you think that you have content that is both “useful and relevant” (remember what Google said) then use words that describe that content. Here some to get you started: "genealogy,genealogy family,genealogy county,free genealogy site,surnames genealogy,history genealogy,family history,ancestry,family search,family tree" Q. What other advice do you have about keywords? A. Okay, since you asked so nicely here are some additional tips  Choose a good primary keyword and make sure you use it in the first sentence of the text on your page. If it can be used in the text of your page additional times all the better. It improves what is know as “keyword density”, but don’t overdo it otherwise the big spam label gets slapped on the page.  Check your spelling. Misspelled keywords can cause problems in almost all search engines.  Try to test out 2 or 3 word phrases. People are now starting to type complete questions into search engines and Google in particular is getting better at parsing these questions into intelligent results.  Give your web pages intelligent names such as www.example.com/history.html rather than www.example.com/his1752.html. Remember this information gets posted on the search result pages. Since this is the first tutorial I would welcome your feedback and how the future ones might be improved. Send all comments to : paulpuente@gmail.com. All the best and I hope you have learned a few things to improve the ranking of your website. Joyce Gaston Reece,President American Local History Network Join us in celebrating our 20th year! www.alhn.org