7 Steps to Creating Human and Search Engine Friendly Web Pages

After making your Website human friendly, you have to make it search engine friendly so that human searchers can easily find your site in the search engine result pages. By following the steps described below, you can optimize your Website for search engines.

1. Use a keyword research tool for mining keywords related to your site's offerings. One of the most effective and free keyword research tool is Google Adwords Keyword tool. Do a Google search for the URL of the site.

You start with some broad keywords like "golf ball" and the tool lists all the related keywords people use in their search queries related to "golf ball". The tool also displays the monthly volumes of those search queries.

2. Get a domain name that is not too long and has relevancy to the products or services your site is offering. Using the keyword research tool, pick a few keywords related to your site. Pick a domain name based on one of these keywords.

All the domains based on broad keywords are already sold out. So you cannot get a domain based on a broad keyword, like golf ball. If you find one, grab it without any delay. However, most domain registrars, like Godaddy, have domain finding tools that suggest available domains based on broad keywords.

3. Your Website title that is located in the HTML TITLE tag should be meaningful and at the same time it should contain related keywords. Limit the title tag to 50 characters so that is is not truncated in the search result page.

4. The most important meta tag in a web page for a search engine crawler is the description meta tag that has two attributes: NAME="description" and CONTENT="your site's content". Describe your site's contents using a few sentences in the content attribute of the META tag. Your site description should contain related keywords.

5. Create quality contents using texts and graphics. Use short paragraphs for text and separate texts using headings or H1 tag, and sub headings or H2 tags. Use one H1 tag per page. Don't forget to use keywords in your paragraphs, H1, and H2 tags.

Use plenty of white spaces and bulleted items so that visitors can scan your page easily. Most people don't read web pages but they scan to find texts that are of particular interest to them.

6. If you are using images, use keywords in the ALT and TITLE attributes of the IMG tag. Use keywords for image file names. Most people use meaningless image file names like image1, image2, etc. Search engine crawlers have no way to understand what image1 and image2 are all about.

7. Cross links your web pages using keywords in the anchor texts. For example, if your web site is about golf ball, you can use anchor text "callaway golf ball" on your home page to direct visitors to a page dedicated to "callaway golf ball".

Search engine optimization is the art of creating contents for human readers using keywords. Don't create contents for search engines. Create contents for human and use keywords strategically placed in your contents for the consumption of search engine crawlers.