Site Map  |  Search:  
Home My Account Support Contact Solutions About dbCanvas Demo
Login Help  Login Help
Webmail Username: Password:
Home
Wed, Aug 19 2009

Feeding the Search Engine

Take your time, do your keyword research. Keywords are terms that people use when searching  for your services or products on a search engine. Find out what terms people use and relate to your industry. Use the terms you find to describe your services.  It's not the amount of words in an article that matters so much, it's the message it conveys. Having a lot of content only helps when it is relative to what the visitor is looking for. Over time, search engines will reward you for providing honest, well thought out content that is direct and easy to understand.

Optimizing Content Headings - H1 H2 H3Rich Text Editor

dbCanvas uses a rich text editor for its content editing. With our rich text editor, formatting headings is simple. Highlight the text you would like to format as your heading and then use the Format dropdown to select the heading format you want. In this picture we are formatting the text 'Heading' as Heading 1.

Search engines use the Heading Formatting as a way of organizing your content into a hierarchy. Your headings define the outline for viewing your page content in the proper sequence. H1, H2, and H3 all point to the importance of each portion of content. When you are writing an article or describing a service, use the different headings to structure your content this way.

Content Headings are also important in another way. Your website styling is defined in the sites CSS file. CSS stands for cascading style sheet. When you use your heading formatting properly it makes it easy to apply site wide heading styling that is uniform. When you change the styling for a particular heading like H1 in the style sheet, it will change how every H1 formatted heading will look across the whole site.

Optimizing the Page PropertiesPage Properties Button

The page properties are a part of every page you create. Page properties include the page title, description, and keywords. Edit the page properties by clicking the page properties icon while in editing mode. This should be the first thing you do when creating a new page. The page properties icon is in the upper right hand corner in the dbCanvas Helper Bar.

Page Title Properties

Very Important. Make sure it's good, and then leave it alone. Age is a factor with this element when being indexed by search engines. Use unique and descriptive terms for your Page Titles on every page. Avoid weird characters, stick to letters and numbers as much as you can. Commas and dashes or okay. Use your researched terms to help identify the content on page through the page title. Instead of a page title like 'Billy's Baseball Cards,' target your content with a page title like 'Collectible Baseball Cards'.Editing the Page Properties

Keyword Properties

Keyword research is so important. The goal here is to use terms that relate to your industry. Be accurate but flexible. For help with your keyword research, The Google Keyword tool is a good place to start. Visit Google and search for 'Google Keyword Tool' to learn more.




Page Description Properties

Page Descriptions are display with results in search engines. This should describe the content on your page. Use some of the keywords you have decided on to help describe your content. This will help customers find you easier and give you more targeted traffic coming in.

Optimizing Image Properties and Formatting Hyperlinks

For hyperlinks, a good practice is using descriptive link titles that are relative to what you are linking to. To create a link to the dbCanvas help articles, I would use something like 'dbCanvas Help Articles' instead of the old 'Click here.'  Be informative and try not to leave your visitors guessing about what they are clicking on.

More optimizing; even your website images need to be optimized. Make sure that you are adding the correct 'Alt' description when adding an image with the rich text editor. This description appears as a tool tip when you mouse over an image. Remember, search engines can't see what images look like, so if you use an image for displaying text, the information shown will not be indexed by the search engine spider unless you fill out the "ALT" information. The ALT information is editable by right clicking on an image in the rich text editor. You can also give the image a description which isEditing the Image Properties a good idea. This is done the same way. Right click on the image in the rich text editor and fill out the image ALT and image Description.

In summary, the whole idea with optimizing your websites content is to care about what you're doing.  Care about the people who are using your website and be as informative as possible without running people over with the content steam roller. Put yourself in the position of your website visitor. Be helpful, be informative, structure your content the way search engines like it. Use your Page Title, Keywords,  Descriptions, content Headings, descriptive hyperlinks, and 'Alt' information. Do this, and over time, you will see improvements in your page rank and visitor statistics.

Happy Optimizing!


Back to Articles
Page: 1 [2]
Web Site Template Tuning
© 2001-2008 dbCanvas Inc.
Dallas, TX
(972) 862-2012
Demo