http://www.webvanta.com/ebooks/Webvanta-5tips-for-better-sites.pdf
The Visible Headline
Next most important is the visible headline on the page, which should be in an <h1> tag.
We see a number of common mistakes here:
• Pages that have no headline
• Headlines that are in <p> tags, or other tags, which are then styled to look like
headlines, or in images
• Headlines that aren’t explicit enough
Make sure that your page begins with a headline in an <h1> tag. You'll help the search
engines and the human readers. You can style the h1 to look however you want; it doesn’t
need to be visually huge.
Sometimes you want the main headline to be something clever, or cute, that lacks the
keywords you’d like to have in the headline for SEO. In this case, you may want to put the
actual headline in a <p> tag, styled to look like a headline, and then have the SEOoptimized headline below it in an <h1> tag, styled to look like a subhead or an introductory
paragraph.
In writing that headline, keep the site visitor in mind, but make it more explicit than you
might naturally do. This is much the same as for the metadata page title, except that you
may want something shorter on the page.
For example, while you might use "Experienced dog grooming services for Sonoma
County, in Santa Rosa, CA" for the metadata page title, but use "Expert Dog Grooming"
for the h1 tag (the page title that appears on the page).
Now Fill In the Meta Description
The metadata description tag is important not for getting your page listed on the search
results page, but for getting users to click on the result if they do see it.
The search engine will show your description as the two lines of text below the headline; if
you don’t provide a meta description, it will grab something from the body of your page,
which may or may not be what you want.
The description should be about 150 characters long, since that is what fits in a typical
search listing. Think of it as a teaser that promotes your page. Write it for humans, not for
search engines. But it is helpful to include your targeted keywords, because the search
engine will highlight them, drawing users to your listing.
Don’t Worry About Meta Keywords
The keyword metadata field is not worth worrying about, at least on your first pass. Google
ignores the keywords in this field, because they are too easily abused. (Too many people put
“Britney Spears” in the keywords, for example, not because their page had anything to do
with Britney but because it is one of the highest-volume search terms.) Other search
engines may use them, but you won’t sacrifice much by ignoring them.
This does not mean you can ignore knowing what keywords you are targeting; that is an
entirely different matter. But the place to use keywords is in your page titles, headlines, and
body copy — not in the keywords meta tag.
Links on Webpages:
• The anchor text (the text to which the link is applied) is important. If the link says
“click here”, then that link text tells the search engine nothing about the site being
linked to. But if the link says “San Francisco Hotels”, the text tells the search
engines a great deal.
• Links from many sources have a special attribute applied, “rel=nofollow”. This tells
search engines not to take that link into account. Nofollow was invented to reduce
the link spam on Wikipedia and soon spread to many other sites. So while links
anywhere are good for driving traffic to your site, many links in blog comments and
forums do not help your search rankings
• One-way links (a site that links to you but that you do not link to) are thought to
be more valuable than reciprocal links.
• Google is thought to penalize sites if large quantities of links to your site show up
in a short period of time, especially if the links are identical. This is presumably an
attempt to defeat people with a large network of sites that exist just to provide
backlinks, as well as other “black hat” SEO techniques
You need to solicit links, but you should do so carefully, choosing sites that relate to your
topic and have good search ranking themselves. It is helpful to suggest link text, but vary it
from time to time.
You will get solicitations from random sites asking for reciprocal links. These links are of
little value, and may even hurt your rankings, so just ignore these requests unless the site is
one you would want to point people to anyway.
Getting good links is a slow and time consuming task, but it is one that is essential if you
are going to get sites to rank well on competitive terms. If you have great content that
people share with their friends and blog about, then incoming links may happen on their
own.
If you want to be more proactive, do searches on the terms on which you hope to rank.
Look at what sites rank well, and look for ones that might link to you. If there are
influential blogs, add your comments to their posts regularly. This may not give you useful
links back, but it helps to build a relationship and a reputation.
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