Search engine technology can be very confusing and intimidating, especially when you're constantly receiving spam email insiting that your site is in trouble and can never be found. Everyone is out to sell you something. You may want to take on some of this to be able to register your site free of charge on your own.

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Clients of SherwoodPhoto.com and SherwoodHosting.com receive free access to additional information to help optimize search engine exposure while minimizing the expenses involved.

WHAT TO BE AWARE OF IN YOUR OWN WEB PAGE TECHNICAL DESIGN

Below are some definitions and descriptions of a web page's technical nuts and bolts that contribute to search engine success. Prepping your pages for search engine friendliness is worth the time and effort and straightforward to do.

(Tags are special syntax within your web page html file that in the cases below do not affect the formatting of your web page, but do provide valuable information to the search engine cataloguing process.)

In all the places that keywords can go below (titles, lists, etc.) be sure to include all differing synonyms and phrases people might use to find you. For instance, if you're a wedding musician, you might use: Nuptial Musicians Wedding Service Ceremony Music for Songs, Accompaniments, Voice, Instrumentalist, Bands, for all Marriage Events and Venues. Something like this sort of makes sense to a human, but it is critical for the search engine indexing process. Endings for the words (plural, verb vs. nouns, etc.) usually do not make a difference for search engine purposes.

Title tag
Near the top of your page is the tag that looks similar to <TITLE>Untitled document</TITLE>. It's crucial to have a good title: choose a title between 10 and 20 words in length that clearly explains what the page / site is about and including words and phrases you think people will search for. If geography is important, include all the various ways that people might be looking for you (region, county, city, state, area). I believe the title is almost more important for search engine cataloguing that it is for human readability purposes.

Meta tags
The Meta tags are far less critical than the <TITLE> tag but still effective for some search engines. The description tag is particularly useful for controlling how your link will appear. Here you want to use 10 to 15 words that describe the content of your page, preferably using the same collection of words and phrases that can be found in your main body of text. This again could and should change from page to page depending on content. For example:

<META NAME="description" content="Quality music for wedding cermonies">

The other main meta tag is the keywords. Choose words and phrases that people will search on, are relevant to your site and appear in your main body of text. Few search engines really utilize these, but it's a good idea to include them anyway. For example:

<META NAME="keywords" content="classical music, ceremonial marches, processional, recessional">

So with this information the top of your code should look something like this:

<html>

<head>
<TITLE>Your title</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" content="Your summary sentence">
<META NAME="keywords" content="Your keywords">

Body text
Search engines generally evaluate the text from your site and use it, amongst other factors, as a test of relevancy for the search. So having keyword-rich text is important for giving the search engine something to pick up on. You shouldn't go overboard here but certainly having your keywords near the top of the page is going to be an advantage. Don't try fooling the search engines by hiding text, or listing your keywords 50 times to improve ranking- it will know you're playing games and will subtract points.

Alt information
Each picture/graphic should have accompanying alt information - that's the text in a box you see when you hover your cursor over a graphic. Apart from aiding the disabled viewers, you can also help with your search engine optimization by using concise keyword rich descriptions. For example:

<img border="0" src="images/logo.gif" width="140" height="113" alt="J.S. Bach Logo">

These are used for image cataloguing on search engines that provide that service.

Internal links
A search engine robot will be able to look at the various pages on your site by spidering through your navigation menu IF it is available in HTML code (as opposed to Flash, for example). So somewhere on the page, be sure to include links to your other pages.

Incoming links
It appears that the importance of quality links to your site will improve your ranking. You may want to spend some time asking to have links placed on related sites, preferably text and with your keyword(s) incorporated. Beware of "link farms" however. If you want to find out what a quality link would be in the eyes of Google, download their toolbar here (for Internet Explorer only) and check the page rank (bar graph) - anything above 5 is good in this respect.