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Optimizing Your
Site for Search Engines
by ethanm
First, these tips are for HTML not Flash. Flash sites won't
get spidered. So if you really want to get high Search
Engine placement you should build an HTML version of your
site.
The Title Tag
The Title Tag is very important. It displays in the browsers
title bar and is also used when naming bookmarked sites.
Most importantly the Title of your page is shown prominently
on search engines results. The recommended maximum number of
characters for this tag is 60.
For instance, within the title tag of this page that you are
reading is this text: kirupa.com - Shocked Flash Resource
for Tutorials, Downloads, Support, Links, and more:
Title bar in your browser:
Title in browser:
Title in search results:
The
Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description Tag allows you to enter your own page
description for the search results. Not all search engines
will use your description. For example google will create
it's own based on the content of the page. The recommended
maximum number of characters for this tag is 150.
<meta name="description"
content="kirupa.com is an online Flash resource that
provides useful tutorials, links, downloads, and support for
Flash MX, Flash 5, ActionScript, Swift 3D, Flix, Reviews,
FrontPage 2002, and more!">
The
Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text
for crawler-based search engines to index along with your
body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major
crawlers, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now
ignore the tag. This Tag should contain keywords and keyword
phrases that are important to your site. The recommended
maximum number of characters for this tag is 874 although we
would not recommend you use this entire allowance or you may
then suffer from keyword saturation.
Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="flash, flash
mx, Flash 5, actionscript, swift 3d, flix, reviews, cool
sites, site of the week, kirupa, FrontPage 2002: A
Beginner's Guide, shop, forums, gallery, tutorials, tips,
help, downloads, flas, scripted movement tutorials">
Outside the META Tags.
It's very important to use your keywords and or important
words in your content. Here are several important ways to
use text on yours site so Search Engines will see it.
Linking Pages
You should create a page to list sites that link to you.
Link trading is very popular and the more sites linking to
you the greater your placement on the Search Engines.
ALT tags.
Add alt tags to your images and enter in text that is
relevant to the image and also used in your description,
title, or keywords:
Headings
Heading tags should be used to make certain phrases stand
out on your page. Robots place higher importance on <h1>
tags. Near the top of your page you should use a H tag to
highlight some text. This could be the same as your page
title.
Using Links
Robots put importance in the text between your <a>
tags. They put a higher relevance on the link when it has
descriptive text. For example:
Instead of
To fill out our flash site form click here.
Use
Fill out our
flash site form.
Content Relevance
Make sure that the words you use in your title and
description are used in your content of that page. There is
an art to this as using keywords too many times will make
your content saturated and robots will ignore it.
Page naming
If you really want to use all your cards, name your pages
with relevant words. For example, if you have a page about
Flash Tutorials, name it. Flash_tutorials.html.
Don't be sneaky
Making some text the same color as your background color or
trying to sneak keywords into comment tags will just get you
booted from the Search Engines.
Hope these helped...if not, post them on the
forums and
we'll discuss it!
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