3. Put your keywords in the best places

Search engines give more weight to keywords found in the following places. This list is roughly in order of importance.

Domain name

Often overlooked is the domain name. Search engines give a lot a weight to keywords found in the domain name, especially if the keywords are hyphenated, e.g. "spanish-holidays.co.uk".

Page Title

You should always set the page title because that's what appears at the top of the browser when someone looks at your page. It also provides the text when someone adds the page to their favourites.

Search angines also figure that the page title ought to be a fairly important indicator of the web page's content, so make sure it contains the important keywords that you would like it to be found under. Again, don't go overboard!

File name

Search engines look at the filename for your page to see of it gives any clues to the content. By default (using 123Live), your page's file name will be the link text with the spaces replaced by hyphens. It is a good idea to manually set the file name. Once you have set the file name, don't change it unless you really have to, otherwise links to the page from search engines will not work until the page is re-indexed.

Separating the words with hyphens is important, if the words are separated by underscores or not separated at all, the search engines will not see them as separate words. This page is mainly about meta tags, that's why we gave it a file name of "meta-tags". The ".htm" is added by 123Live when the page is published.

Headings

Provided your website uses conventional HTML "header tags" (123Live websites do, but a lot of websites don't), then search engines will give more weight to keywords found in headings. 

Body text

The first two or three Kbytes of body text usually counts more then the rest of the page. This is one of the reasons 123Live generates very optimised HTML code, so that most of your page content is real words rather than a lot of bloated HTML formatting.

Inward links

Search engines look at the words that form a link to a page, that is one of the reasons it's better to use text links than graphical links. Make sure that, if possible, your link text includes keywords that people may use to find the page using a search engine.

Meta tags

Meta tags are words that are included in your web page but are invisible to viewers. Their purpose is to act as a guide to search engines so that they can list your website appropriately when someone types in a search.

At least, that's how it was in the old days, before commercial "search engine optimisation" companies tried all sorts of techniques to "spam" search engines into giving websites rankings they did not deserve. All we can say is that search engines may look at your meta tags and give some weight to them, so it is a good idea to use them in your web pages. This is very easy to do with 123Live (see screen shot below).

The meta description should be one or two lines in readable English that describes the content of the page. This is used by some search engines to provide the text for your entry, so make sure you encapsulate what this page has to offer potential visitors. Don't use more than two lines. Anything more is likely to get ignored, which may render the remainder meaningless.

The meta keywords are a list of words and phrases separated by commas. Again, keep it to two lines and you can't go far wrong. Search engines may penalise pages where there are either too many keywords or the keywords don't match the content of the page. Put your most important keywords at the beginning and always make sure that the keywords and phrases also appear in the regular content within the page.

Alt text

"Alt text" is the text that appears when you hover your mouse over an image. It is also used by screen readers for the visually impaired.