Where to put your keywords

Domain name

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

If you are choosing a new domain name, give some thought to including some keywords within the domain name.

Page Title

	The page title appears at the top of the browser, and many other places.

The page title 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. And it appears in the browser's history.

Search engines 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.

With 123Live you can easily set the page title by right-clicking the page in the menu.

File name

	Example of keywords in the page's file name

Search engines look at the filename for your page to see if it gives clues to the content.

If you are using 123Live, your page's file name will be the menu text with the spaces replaced by hyphens, but it is a good idea to manually set the file name to ensure it contains just the important keywords.

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 may not see them as separate words.

With 123Live you can easily set the file name by right-clicking the page in the menu.

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.

Always make sure your pages have a main heading that gives search engines and human visitors the keywords they need to decide the relevance of the page.

Use subheadings to visually break up your pages, but also to highlight more keywords and phrases. 

Body text

If a phrase is found near the top of the page it will count more than if it is lower down. Indeed, search engines may not read the whole page, just the first few kilobytes. 123Live websites use highly optimised HTML code. This is so the visible text on your page is not buried amongst HTML formatting.

Links

Search engines look at the words within links to a page. This is one of the reasons it's better to use text links than graphical links.

Try to include keywords within links to your web pages. This includes links from other sites, and links within your own website.

Example:

Click here for more info - BAD!

Read about holidays in Spain - GOOD!

Those who are serious about SEO will encourage links from other sites. Non-competing sites are usually happy to do this, provided you link to them in return. Be clear to others what text you want in the link to your website. The text adjacent to the link will also be taken into account, so reciprocal links often have four or five words within the link itself, followed by a sentence or two of keyword-rich text.

Make sure that you only get links from genuine websites with content related to that on your own website. Links from 'link farms' are a bad idea, and can have a detrimental effect on your ranking.

Alt text

'Alt text' means 'alternative text for images'. It is used by screen readers for the visually impaired to tell them what the image is about.

The alt text is also read by search engines, so make sure it contains those vital keywords.

123Live users can simply right-click an image to set the alt text.

Meta tags

Meta tags are words that are included in your web page which are invisible to viewers. Their purpose is to act as a guide to search engines as to the content of the page.

At least, that's how it was in the old days. These days they are usually ignored by search engines, or given low credence. But they are worth completing as a final step.

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 offers potential visitors. Don't use more than two lines. Anything more is likely to get ignored.

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 page content.

Setting the meta tags for your website is a very simple process using the 123Live content management system.

Monitor your search engine results

Leave it a month and then find out the ranking for your chosen keywords again. Hopefully you will see improvements, but give it time. 

Keep search engine optimisation in mind whenever you are working on your website content.