Dreamweaver in a Nutshell

Search Engines

Most search engines are moving toward a pay-to-play business model. The site that pays the most money appears at the top of the search results listing, and only sites that pay a fee are listed at all. This system undermines everything you may have learned previously about search engine rankings, but the following tips are good for optimizing page placement in any search engine. Because each search engine determines relevancy differently, one <meta> tag won’t gain your prominent placement in all the search engines. Use a combination of tags and keywords on different pages to increase your overall chance of success.

• Provide a different <title> for each web page.

• Create a description tag containing keywords or key phrases—including those used in the <title> tag—by using Insert → Head Tags → Description. Write a clear, compelling description of each page in 25 words or less. Do not repeat your key phrase several times; instead, use it with other related key phrases not included in that page’s <title> tag.

• Create one keyword tag for each page on your site by using Insert → Head Tags → Keywords. Add the best key phrase for the page in the <meta name="keywords"> tag and use only one or two key phrases in this tag (not the 1,000 characters allowed).

• Make your key phrase part of the first sentence of your page content, which should be the same as your description <meta> tag. (This technique covers you for robots that index the first sentence and those that don’t.)

• Create a site ...