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Internet Strategy & Internet Marketing Strategy Development for Corporates, Charities and Small Business

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Introduction to Header Information

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If you're unfamiliar with how web pages are constructed this article gives an overview of how "Header information" is important. Web pages are typically written in "HTML" which stands for hypertext markup language. Basically HTML is a series of codes or "tags" that tell Internet Explorer or whatever other browser you are using how the page should be laid out and what the contents of the page are.

Web pages are essentially made up of two parts. Within the HTML code essentially everything that you can see on a web page will be stored within whats called the "BODY" section. The other section is called HEAD - commonly referred to as the Header section. Information stored within the Header is not shown when you open a web page. It is used behind the scenes to store web programming, link to other resources, describe how the page should be laid out and a number of other functions. In addition it also contains important information about the content of the web page - this information is used by search engines to work out what your site and the page in question are about.

In terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) there are a number of things to focus on in terms of what goes into this header section. Each web page has a TITLE tag. This is the most important "field" that you need to address. There are also a series of what are called META tags. Most importantly you need to consider:

1) the META Decription tag - a sentence or two describing what the page is about
2) META Keywords - words or phrases that might be used to search for the page

Entries elsewhere in this blog will describe how best to complete these.

Last Updated on Thursday, 15 October 2009 13:48
 

Ensure your site gets indexed with Google Sitemaps

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Google Sitemaps are "XML" files that contain a list of all the web pages on your site, provide an indication of how often they are updated and the importance of each. Once created you upload them to your website - in what's called the "root directory". By root directory it means that the sitemap is available from e.g. www.yoursite.org/sitemap.xml and NOT from www.yoursite.org/foldername/sitemap.xml

If you don't already use Google Webmaster sign up for it, add and verify your site and register the sitemap with Google. This will ensure that as many pages as possible get indexed.

For smaller sites under 500 pages you can ignore all of the techie stuff and go to a site such as xml-sitemaps.com - ( http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ ) and enter your web address and they automatically scan your site and generate a sitemap for you.

For larger sites sites such as xml-sitemaps will generate a sitemap for you for a fee. Remember you need to update your sitemap from time to time as your site changes - for example as you add or remove pages (it doesn't matter if you just update content within pages). To update your sitemap simply generate another and upload it to your site to replace the old one. You don't need to tell Google Webmaster about this.

For larger or more dynamic sites and particularly larger sites that are run by content management systems you should ideally either choose software or look at developing an add-on that will update your sitemap automatically. Otherwise Google will continue to use the old sitemap until you replace it. Technical details on the format of Google sitemaps will be covered in another post.

Last Updated on Thursday, 15 October 2009 14:00
 
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