| Source Code: Places You May Not Have Thought To Put Keywords
We all know it's good practice to put in-context
keywordsinto page titles, meta tags and alt tags. But here are a
few places you may not have thought about. 1. Tables - You're most likely familiar with what a
table tag looks like. They generally look like this <table
width="100%" border="0"
cellpadding="0"> or some variation, right? There
are actually two areas within a table tag that keywords can be
applied to. The table ID and Summary. A table tag written in
this manner will look more like this <table
width="100%" border="0"
cellpadding="0" id="Accommodation Rates"
summary="A breakdown of rates for Accommodations at
Estancias Los Potreros">. 2. File
Names - HTML, images, CSS files, php scripts, cgi scripts, asp
scripts, java apps, video clips, sound bites, and every file you
use to create your web site can be named using keywords that
apply to the web site content. Making sure these titles also
apply to the purpose of the file itself is also very important,
especially if the file type can be indexed by search engine
bots, like php and flash. If the name of the file has very
little to do with what the file contains, it will have little to
no affect on your keyword density. 3.
Reference Tags - A normal reference tag looks like this <a
href="http://www.ride-americas.com">. A title can
be added to this tag making it look like this <a
href="http://www.ride-americas.com"
title="Horseback Riding Vacations in Argentina">.
This can also be applied to mailto: reference tags. Because this
text will be seen by web vistors when they hover their mouse
over the link, it's good practice to keep it relevant and
to-the-point. Never sacrifice user-friendliness for more
keywords. You may get lots of traffic with the keywords, but
without user-friendliness, that traffic will leave
displeased. 4. Comment Tags - I thought
everyone knew this one, but I haven't seen many sites out there
making use of it. Comment tags are generally used to remind us
of what the following or preceding code does, like little HTML
post-it notes that can only be seen in the source code. They
look like this <!--Horseback Riding Accommodations Rates
Page--> where everything between the "<!--" and
"-->" is the comment or note we're leaving
ourselves. Used wisely and in moderation, this can be yet
another opportunity to add keywords to your site's source
code. All of these areas are good areas to
add keyword density to your site, but they all must be used with
caution. Everything in these areas should be in context, meaning
they should relate directly to what a web visitor will be
seeing. They should also be used in moderation. Strings of
keywords in a table summary tag will surely start raising some
flags at the Googleplex. It won't be long now before Google and
other major search engines start keeping a closer, more critical
eye on these areas. The most important rule of thumb to go by
when designing and optimizing any web site, is to keep it user
friendly. A pleased and impressed web visitor is the best web
site optimization and will surely lead to your site's
success.
About the author:
Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone Designs, an Internet
Marketing and SEO company in Vancouver, Canada. She has been
involved in web development and marketing since 1995 and has
helped start several businesses since then in the Vancouver
area. More of Courtney's articles are available at
http://www.abalone.ca/resources/.
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