SEO 101

Headers: The use of header tags used appropriately is a very important factor not only in how people read your page, but also how search engines navigate your site. Headline tags should be relevant to your title tag, meta data, and keywords. Also, title tags should be subordinate and complementary to each other. For example: If you were creating a page about the chronological work of Mozart, your H1 - H3 tags might look like the example below. In this instance you can see that the H1 tag starts with a broad subject and then narrows down into child-subjects that are more specific. Also note the keyword, Mozart, used at the beginning of the headline tags.
Headline tags.

<h1> Mozart: The Complete Composition Chronology of a Timeless Composer </h1>
<h2> Mozart-Salzburg: The Early Years Childhood Musical Compositions</h2>
<h3> Mozart-Vienna: A Maturing Master Spreads His Wings In the City of Music</h3>

Search Engines Are Blind, But Insightful:. Have you ever seen an artsy, Flash introduction on a web page that requires you to wait before it plays? Guess what, search engines don't even see that intro. They skip it because it is not their preferred information. What they want is text. Search engines don't have eyes, so they need to go by a more objective medium. Plain text, like the text you're reading right now, is what the bots want. Your site should be loaded with compelling text that both visitors and bots find appealing. Great, so let's jam each page with as many keywords as possible. Actually - that's not a good idea. Google and other search engines recognize this practice as spamming and will penalize your site for it.

Alt Text:. As mentioned, search engines can't see images, video, or flash intros, but there is an indirect way of sharing with the bots what the media is about using Alt Text. Alt Text allows a web master to tell the bots an image is about snowboarding, for example. See below. .

<img alt="snowboarding" src="./images/snowboarding.gif" border="0">

The Alt tag (in this case, snowboarding) should not only show a picture of some sort of snowboarding activity, but also the page title, meta information, and links coming to this page should all ideally say something about snowboarding. When all the ingredients of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are mixed together, the result is high rankings in Google and other search engines.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate refers to the percentage of site visitors who land on a particular page, and then exit the site without going anywhere else.

Why is bounce rate important?

If you have a high bounce rate, that is red flag. It means that you are not producing compelling content to site visitors. Or, it could also mean that the link that drove the visitor to your site did not accurately describe where it would be taking them. Either way, knowing why visitors are leaving is just as important as knowing as why they come.