Reciprocal Links And Meta Tags
As the final part of my 10 step guide on How To Make A Website I'm going to cover a couple of SEO techniques. I definitely need to point out that these 10 steps are by no means the only steps to building an effective website but it's a nice start. Also, the two steps that I cover in regards to SEO are just a taste of what you're going to learn.
Search engines are always changing and the competition is becoming more informed so it's important to visit sites that are dedicated to the subject of search engine optimization. By far, my favorite site in regards to keeping up with the latest search engine trends & releases is definitely SEO Book.
Tip 9: Reciprocal Linking Campaigns
I'm going to write a couple of in-depth posts on linking in the near future but I wanted to at least give you a heads up to again at least let you know that it exists and to get you thinking about it. Reciprocal links are links to another website placed on your site in exchange for links back to your site from theirs. This is a very important method of building link popularity which is an instrumental part of getting high search engine rankings.
It's actually very simply to do but there are certain things to think about. Basically you come up with an agreement with the webmaster of a website related to your topic and you place a link of your website to their website and in exchange the webmaster places a link back to you.
The most important aspect of reciprocal links is the 'anchor text' that's used to link back to you. For example, you have a website name ChromeWheels.com, you would want the anchor text from the other website to use the anchor text of chrome wheels in the link back to your site. It would appear similar to this: Chrome Wheels. The code would appear something like this <a href="http://www.chromewheels.com">Chrome Wheels</a>. This is basically telling search engines that this page is related to chrome wheels.
As far as I know, it's not important if the link is case sensitive such as 'chrome wheels' or 'Chrome Wheels'. This definitely doesn't mean that it doesn't matter so I would just request that it be formatted the same with all websites. Also, I request that all links contain the www such as www.chromewheels.com rather than just chromewheels.com.
It's best to manually contact potential link exchange partners but I use Arelis to manage my link exchange campaigns as you can run a script to see if anyone has removed links to you plus a variety of other features that makes managing a link campaign easy. Again, I would never use it to automate link exchange request emails but it's a great way to manage your current links.
Again, I'm going to do an couple of in depth posts on reciprocal links but I wanted to at least bring it up.
Tip 9: Meta Tags
In my opinion, as well as many other people, the most important meta tag is the Title tag. This is the tag that displays at the top of your screen and is a very important part of SEO.
A couple of other tags that are used are the Description & Keyword tags. As people have abused them by stuffing them with keywords, related & not related to their website, they have become less effective. With that said, you'd never find a page of mine without these two tags because it definitely won't hurt, just keep them related to your web page without stuffing them with too much repetition of your keywords.
Here is how a basic meta tag would appear on a web page. I'll again use the chrome wheels example.
<HTML>
<head>
<title>ChromeWheels.com - Chrome Wheels, Custom Rims and Tires</title>
<meta name="description" content="ChromeWheels.com offers the internet's largest selection of chrome wheels. Shipping discounts available on all chrome wheel and tire packages.">
<meta name="keywords" content="chrome wheels, chrome wheel, custom rims, tires, rims, discount chrome wheels">
</head>
I'll save some additional meta tags such as 'revisit-after', 'robots' & 'distribution' for another post but these are definitely the tags that you don't want to miss when creating your pages.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com