Irrelevant Ramblings

In this day in age when all you ever hear on TV is that the planet is heating up, the polar bears are going extinct, and that we should watch our carbon foot print, I find it hard to believe that some companies seem to care less.

I ordered a package from the US the other day and it was shipped via FedEx.  The package in question was sent out of Medford, Oregon and was coming to Kelowna, BC Canada. As you may or may not know, Kelowna is north and slightly east of Medford Oregon (see map 1), so the obvious route to take , would  be north and to the east of Medford and come right to Kelowna, but that is not what FedEx did.

In stead Fedex followed the following route. 

Medford, OR -> Memphis, TN -> Vancouver BC -> Richmond BC -> Vancouver BC -> Kelowna BC. 

I sure hope that they bought some carbon credits to offset that delivery.

KEYWORDS play an important role in search engine results. Today we are going to discuss where and when we should use keywords on our site.

First, what are KEYWORDS?

On the web, a keyword is a reference to the content and/or the type of meta element included in a given web page‘s HTML code to aid in the page’s indexing. A keyword meta element may include several comma-separated keywords (or keyword phrases, each of which may contain several individual words). Source wikipedia.

KEYWORDS in Your Title

Using the right keywords in your title will help produce the results you are looking for. The title is the first thing your searcher will see in the search results.

If your title includes keywords they are looking for they are more likely to click on your link.

How do you use keywords in your title. You need to use the most important keywords in your title.  For instance, for Simone Wittenberg Photography, we used the KEYWORDS ‘Kelowna Wedding Photographer’. 

In HTML the title would look like this:

<title>Simone Wittenberg Photography / Kelowna Wedding Photography</title>

KEYWORDS in Your Description

The second thing a searcher sees in the search results is your description. Using keywords won’t help in your search engine ranking, but it will give your searcher a better idea of what your site is about or has to offer. The description should be a short explanation of your site and of  your title.

In HTML the description would look like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”Kelowna wedding photographer”>

KEYWORDS Meta Tag

You can also specify keywords you want to be ranked for by using the <meta> tag in your HTML. This is in addition to the keywords that you have used in your Title and description. (Google doesn’t use these, but Yahoo and MSN do) The Keyword meta tag looks like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Kelowna, Wedding, Photographer” />

Each individual term is separated by a comma.

KEYWORDS in Content

Having keywords in your content is not something that is very important to you reader, but it is important to have because this is what the search engines look for. This does NOT mean that you should only use keywords in the body of your website, but they should be interspersed throughout. 

It is believe that only 1 in every 20 words should be a keyword. If you use more than this you could be punished by the search engine for keywords stuffing.

KEYWORDS in Tags

Search engines read the HTML code of the pages they are read. In order to make your webpage more SEO friendly, you should use your h1, h2, h3, and h4 tags. There are meanings to each of these tags:

• h1- title tag
• h2- subtitle
• h3-  chapter
• h4- sub chapter

You can also use bold and italic commands to add importance to words in the content of your site.

Another place to use tags is in your images.  When you add an image to a webpage, you can add <title> and <alt> tags. These are important because search engines cannot see images and rely on these tags to index image content.

Conclusion

This is what I have learned about keywords and I hope that this has been helpful to you. Next week we will look at link-building.

Continue on to Link Building

A fellow Blogger wrote about a $5 dollar valentine gift. Well I found a valentine gift for far less than that. How’s $.07 catch you?

Now I know what you’re thinking what van I get for 7 cents? A life.

7 cents is all it costs to help save the life of a pregnant mother or baby in Africa. There are a numer of diseases that run rampant in Africa. Tetnus is one of those diseases. Pampers and UNICEF have teamed up to make a difference .

The Pampers-UNICEF partnership has already provided more than 25 million vaccines to moms and babies in developing countries, where tetanus kills 140,000 infants and 30,000 women each year, according to UNICEF.

There is a cure for tetnus and all it costs is 7 cents. For 7 cents you can buy a life saving needle and help a young African baby’s life or the life of an African mother.

To give the gift of life this valentines go to the UNICEF donate page and make a donation.

And if you are feeling really generous head over to Brad’s page and buy someone water.