This is a post from Zeke Camusio on LinkedIn. He has a great website for Internet marketers anyone should see if they are serious about  Internet marketing and creating effective websites. -Editor

When it comes to designing SEO-friendly web pages, it’s all about creating a powerful SEO head section. The HTML head is what will make you or break you in the search engines, especially if you don’t follow SEO guidelines.

The Basics of HTML Head

Document type definition (DTD statement)
This is the first tag on your web page, and helps load and index pages faster. It helps spiders efficiently “deep crawl” your pages. Make sure you use the correct tag.

Software such as Dreamweaver automatically inserts the proper tags. If you are editing older pages, you will need to manually insert the correct tag. Consult with the HTML validator at W3C, or consult with a web designer for more information.

Character Set Tag
SEO gurus recommend listing the character set tag before the title tag. The character set tag displays text character in browsers.

Title Tag
The title tag is very important – you need to grab visitors’ attention IMMEDIATELY. The Title tag is displayed at the top of the browser’s window and displays text in search results. You want to stir their emotions with titles and create curiosity so your site will get those CLICKS!

The SEO standard for title tags is 65 characters or less. Remember to be succinct when writing title tags – do not stuff with too many keywords (looks unnatural and will get you booted out of search engines).

Meta Description Tag
Meta description tags work with the title to attract visitors to your pages. The standard SEO rule is to keep your meta descriptions to 150 characters or less.

You should spend the same amount of time and effort creating powerful meta descriptions just like you would with creating your ads (and titles tags!)

Remember your call to action and work in that “offer” to boost click rates.
Don’t be lazy – if you don’t include meta description tags, search engines automatically use snippets of your copy text as your description tag. This isn’t good SEO practice!

Meta Keywords Tag
It’s still recommended by SEO experts to utilize meta keywords tags. Keep keywords to a minimum (6-8 keyword phrases). Leave out your money phrases. Keep keywords general.

If you are too specific, your competitors will scrape your content. A powerful keyword list can be built VERY quickly that way! Don’t spend all that time researching keywords just to give them away.

Keyword phrase you use in your meta keywords tag need to be used in your body content.

Meta Robots Tag
Meta Robots Tags allows content to be kept out of search engines in the following ways:

• <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
Pages aren’t indexed but still followed.

• <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
Pages are indexed but not followed.

• <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
Pages are not indexed or followed.

Meta Author Tag and Image Toolbar Tag (Optional)
The Meta author tag isn’t a SEO requirement. It places your name on your home page (make sure to follow WAI validation).

The Meta image toolbar tag isn’t always used, but is extremely useful if you have large images on page. It also makes your site look cleaner. The meta image toolbar tag is recommended for images with a height/width greater than 100 pixels.

XML Mapsite Verification Tag (Google)
Google’s Sitemap is the best way to get crawled by spiders. It allows your pages to be easily found and indexed.

Tips and Tricks – How to Create Dynamic Meta Tags
• If you use more than 65 characters in your titles, Google automatically displays ellipses which drops click-through rates to 9% fewer compared to titles WITHOUT ellipses.

• Ask questions, use active verbs and list exactly what visitors will receive (body content follows up by answering questions and providing further information)

• Utilize unconventional techniques– make meta tags LOOK different so will people are curious to click on it (use a quote, etc).

• Don’t keyword stuff. Do NOT use keywords of competitors’ products or brands (you could risk a lawsuit!) Keep keywords to 6-8 phrases minimum.

• Avoid hype in meta-descriptions – limit characters to 150 and use 2-3 sentences for your hook.

It is evident that quality backlinks are a key factor to the success of SEO. A more important question that now arises is what best you can do to get backlinks while avoiding getting into problems with search engines. The purpose of having backlinks as an element of page rank algorithm is that people will want to link to pages that have quality content. The more the number of backlinks a site has, the better it is. However, practically speaking, you cannot be relying on the fact that your website content is of high quality and therefore people will link to it.

No doubt if your site has the most relevant and high quality content, you can get many quality backlinks including from websites that contain themes similar to yours. Nonetheless, getting such inbound links may not always be easy and require a lot of efforts, therefore, you may want to look out for other ways to get quality backlinks. Ways to Build Your Backlinks Even if you manage to get lots of backlinks in a natural way, it is never a bad idea to welcome additional quality inbound links.

There are several ways for acquiring backlinks which may be ethical while other ways may be illegitimate and unacceptable and can lead to your site being penalized in the long run. The legitimate ways of getting backlinks include directory submissions, forum posting, linking to other blogs, press releases, etc. Among the unacceptable ways are linking to link farms, buying links in large quantities, getting linked to websites hosting illegal content, linking to other websites that belong to the same person, etc. To start building backlinks, the first step would be to identify sites from where you can acquire quality backlinks. This can be done with the help of Backlink Builder tool which generates a list of websites on entering keywords.

Once you get the list of potential sites where you can post messages, articles, or backlinks to your website, the choice is up to you to visit these sites and start posting your content along with an inbound link to your website in it. You may have a question about how websites generated by the backink building tool can provide backlinks free of cost. The answer to your question simply lies in the fact that such sites need content for their site. With you posting and feeding them with content without getting paid for it, helps you to get free quality backlinks in return from them. It is like free trading where you offer something required by others for free and get what you want for free. However, this free trading lasts as long as you post your content to sites that are respected and also as long as you do not end up posting fake content.

Below are some of the most successful methods that can be used to build backlinks.

Directory Submission Getting your site listed in various directories is one of the basic steps that you should start with in your efforts to build backlinks. It may be unlikely to get any significant traffic through directories; however, the idea here is to get backlinks to improve your page ranking. There are several directories to which your site can be submitted. These can range from general directories, blog directories, SEO friendly directories to non-reciprocal directories (directories that allow you to list your website in their directory even if you do not link back to them). Additionally, it is important that you submit your site to only those directories that have a high page rank. It is also important to know that listing a site in directories is a time consuming process as it requires you to first find out quality directories to which you want to submit your site. Once this is done, you have to search through the categories and sub categories in these directories to find out the specific category to which your website belongs. Therefore, keeping the time constraint in mind, it is a good idea to hire a professional SEO company that provides directory submission services so that you can save time and concentrate your efforts and resources on your other core business functions.

Forum or Blog Posting and Article Directories Forum posting and Blog posting is another way of getting quality backlinks to your site because search engines usually index forums as well. Getting backlinks from blogs or forums that are reputed can be very helpful. However, at times there could be a possibility of your post being edited or deleted by the forum administrator if they find that your posting does not adhere to the forum policy. Moreover, there may be times when the administrators may not allow any links in posts until they are totally relevant. While posting in forums and blogs can be done faster and require lesser efforts, submission of articles to various directories can take a very long time since articles are longer when compared to posts and also involve a though process to write them. However, it would still be worth the time and effort in the long run.

Press Releases and News Announcements Though this is not a day to day practice to build quality backlinks, it does fetch good results if done the right way. There are several websites out there which publish press releases or news announcements free of cost or may charge a fee. A press release that is well written can boost visitor traffic to your site and also a backlink from a reputed site to your site is a value addition to your entire SEO efforts. However, a press release can be used as a medium only if there is something newsworthy. That is the reason why press releases and news announcements do not factor in as a daily way to build backlinks. Content Exchange Content exchange can also be very helpful in getting you quality backlinks. For example, you can provide free RSS feeds to websites that are interested in them. When your RSS feed gets published by the other site, you will get an inbound link to your website. This will also drive a lot of visitor traffic that will visit your website to get more details on the headlines and abstract they read on this other site. Creating Quality Content Creating professional and quality content is also very important to get more backlinks to your site. This is because content that is well written is always noticeable and there would be more number of people who would want to link to it.

Leaving Comments To create awareness and get visibility for your site, you can also leave comments on others blogs. Leaving comments that are appealing to read will always have a good chance of drawing the attention of more people to your site. Practices to Avoid While Building Backlinks There are several ways in which links can be built, however, it is important to realize that certain link building ways can ruin your SEO efforts. One such practice to avoid is link exchange, wherein, when you place a link on another website, that website in return will place a backlink to your website. There are a few things to be considered with this concept of link exchanging. First is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Having more outbound links than inbound links is not good. Second, there could be a possibility of your link partner being a link farm. In this case, your site can get penalized or banned by search engines as link farms are considered as unethical SEO practice. Additionally, you must also be careful about linking to sites that are suspicious or host illegal content. Though search engines will not penalize you for having backlinks from such websites, since you do not have control over what they link to, linking with such sites can ruin your SEO efforts.

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