Every page on your website needs

Every single page on your website must be optimized for the search engines. This means every page needs:

1) Page Title
2) Meta Tags
3) Keywords in Header tags
4) ALT tags on all images
5) Keyword-filled content
6) Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible
7) Keywords in links to other pages
8) Keywords in outbound links

Page Title

Most search engines will use this as part of the information that is displayed when your site shows up in search results.

It is also important in the determination of what a particular page is about. For this reason you should make sure to put keywords in your page title, and preferably at the beginning of the title.

For example, for my AffiliateMatch.com website, my page title is:

Affiliate Programs Directory - AffiliateMatch.com

This helps my site to rank well for searches on “affiliate” or “affiliate programs” or “affiliate programs directory.”

Make sure you put in your most important keywords that you found in the previous article, and try to position them at the beginning.

It is not always possible to put them at the beginning and still be readable, but will definitely help if you are able to do this.

Meta Tags

These things become less and less important as time goes by.

At this point I don’t believe very many search engines even look at Meta Tags anymore, but since they are easy enough to setup, and because some engines do use them, it can’t hurt.

For the search engines that no longer use them, they just ignore them, so it won’t hurt you to have them on your pages.

You can find a Meta Tag Generator easily on the Internet. Just do a search in Google or Yahoo for that keyword. Simply enter your keywords and description and it will create them for you. Just copy and paste that into your page and you are set.

Keywords in Header tags

This means creating a heading for each page that contains the keywords you are targeting on that specific page. For example, if you want to target “search engines”, create a heading with the following code:

<h1>Search Engines</h1>

To your visitors, this would look like:

Search Engines

If that is too large for your particular page, you can also go with <h2> and <h3> tags instead.

To the search engines, this would be considered an important keyword phrase for that page.

The search engine would then compare that to the rest of the text found on the page and use all of this to determine the most important keywords for that particular page.

Make sure you do this on every page of your website!

ALT tags on all images

Another tip is to make sure every image on each page of your website has the ALT attribute. You want to put keywords in these. Don’t overdo this, but use them as an additional place to plug in a few keywords.

The way this looks is:

<img src=”/images/someimage.gif” alt=”search engines”>

In this example, I’d be adding a little more weighting for the phrase: “search engines”.

The actual purpose for this tag is to display text for those that surf with images turned off, or when you move your mouse over an image this text is what will popup.

Somebody along the line figured out you could stuff keywords in there because some search engines use the information in the alt tags for keyword relevancy calculations as well.

Keyword-filled content

You really can’t get away from this one. The more content-filled pages your website has, the better.

The fact is that they like lots of relevant, keyword-filled content. The more they can find, the happier they (and you) will be.

The best way that I have found to do this is with articles.

Articles can be reused in so many different ways, and they add excellent search engine bait for your website.

In later articles I’ll give you some great ideas for using articles as an important part of your traffic-building strategy.

Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible

This is my favorite, and I only wish I would have figured it out sooner! What this entails is very simply making sure you have the keywords you are targeting with a particular page as high up in the code for that page as possible.

To see this, open your web page with Notepad and look through all the gibberish … Title, Meta Tags, all that junk and look for the very first words that would be visible to someone reading your page.

The absolute first words need to be keywords!

As an example, take a look at my AffiliateMatch website by clicking here. Once that window opens up, go to the View Menu in your browser, and then Source. This is the actual code that makes up this page, and is also what the search engines see.

After you wade through all the gobbledygook, you’ll get to the text that visitors will actually see. In this graphic I’ve highlighted the first two words:

Even though there is a ton of junk above that, the search engines know that these are the first ‘visible’ words on this page.

The very first words for this page are affiliate programs. That’s the phrase I’m targeting.

Go to Google.com and type in affiliate programs and see what site is number one, and you’ll see how well this works.

When I first discovered this I actually redesigned this particular website to make sure I put those words at the top like that.

Before this I had a menu on the left that actually was higher up in the code of the page.

The problem was that I had text in there too, like: “Signup for my newsletter!” and things like that. This greatly affected my rankings.

After redesigning my site to allow me to put keywords higher up in the code, I quickly started seeing it rise in the rankings.

If your present design doesn’t allow for this, you might want to give some thought to either having only graphics in the menu, or redesigning it.

The idea for having more graphics is that these will be overlooked by the search engines as they search for the first ‘visible’ text on the page.

Keywords in links to other pages

Make sure when you have links to other pages on your site, or to other websites, that you use your keywords in the link.

For example, if you are targeting “search engines” on a particular page, create a link to a page on your site, and in the link call it: search engine listings.

The page the link points to can simply be a list of the most popular search engines.

Here is the same screen shot of the source code from my AffiliateMatch website so you can see an example of this, but this time I’ve highlighted it so you can see that the first two words that I showed you above are also part of a link:

Search engines will use the text from your links as another determining factor as to what your page is about, and also what the page you are linking to is about.

In this example you’ll notice that I’ve also bolded these words to give even more emphasis to them and make them look more important to the search engines.

I highly recommend that you combine the methods mentioned on this page whenever possible. For example, the first words on your page could be included in a header tag and be a link pointing to another page on your site.

Combining them in this manner can greatly increase your chances of getting great rankings.

Keywords in outbound links

This is the same as the last one, except this refers to using keywords in the links to other sites.

Again, if you are talking about search engines on a page, and link to someone else’s site for an article on search engine positioning, put “search engine positioning” in the actual link so it looks like:

search engine positioning

The alternative that many people use, but that doesn’t help their search engine ranking any, is to just show the website address like:

www.joeshomepages.com/~redy4u/search.htm

This doesn’t help either of you very much … at least not as far as search engines are concerned.

Whenever you are putting together a page to add to your website, fire up this page and incorporate as many of these steps as possible.

Abstract

You can fit on a SVCD without overburnin’:
- approx. 735 MB of MPEG data onto a 74min/650MB disc
- approx. 795 MB of MPEG data onto an 80min/700MB disc

You can fit on a CD-ROM without overburnin’:
- approx. 650 MB of data onto a 74min/650MB disc
- approx. 703 MB of data onto an 80min/700MB disc

Introduction

Let us ignore for now de terms of megabyte for CD capacity and try to understand how de data is stored on a CD.

As well all know, de data is stored digitally as binary data. This means, however de actual information is actually kept on de disc, this information is in de form of “1″s and “0″s. Physically, de information on a CD is as pits on a thin sheet of metal (aluminium).

An a CD-R disc, de data is physically on an organic dye layer which simulates de metal layer on a real pressed CD.

How is de information structured

Now, on de CD, de information isn’t just organised from beginnin’ to end willy-nilly. Oderwise, it would be really hard to find a useful piece of information on de CD.

Rader, de information is organised in sectors. Consider a sector as like a page in a book. Just like you are able to quickly find somethin’ in a book if you know de page number, you can quickly find somethin’ on a CD if you know de sector number.

Now, remember that de CD was original made to hold audio data. It was decided, that de CD would would 75 sectors per second of audio. Although I cannot guess where this number comes from, it is quite appropriate for de audio CD. It means that you can “seek” an audio CD accurately to 1/75th of a second — which is more than enough for consumer purposes.

Now, with this in mind, we can work out de total data capacity of user data for 1 sector.

The total data capacity of user data of 1 sector on a CD

CD audio uses uncompressed PCM stereo audio, 16-bit resolution sampled at 44.1 kHz.

Thus 1 second of audio contains:
16 bits/channel * 2 channels * 44100 samples/second * 1 second
= 1411200 bits
= 176400 bytes

Since dere are 75 sectors per second
1 sector
= 176400 bytes / 75
= 2352 bytes

One sector on a CD contains 2352 bytes max.

The concept of different MODES and FORMS of burnin’

Now, audio CD was well and good, but de medium would become much more useful if you could store oder data on de disc as well. This became to be know as CD-ROM of course.

Now, de audio-CD uses de ENTIRE sector for audio data.

However, for CD-ROMs this caused a problem. Simply, CDs and de CD readin’ mechanisms were not 100% faultless. That is, errors (indeed frequent errors) could be made durin’ de readin’. For audio CDs, this does not matter as much as you could simply interpolate from de adjacent audio samples. This will obviously NOT DO for data CDs. A sin’le bit error could lead to a program bein’ unexecutable or ruin an achive file.

Thus, for CD-ROMs, part of each sector is devoted to error correction codes and error detection codes. The CD-R FAQ has de details, but in effect, only 2048 bytes out of a total of 2352 bytes in each sector is available for user data on a data CD.

This burnin’ mode is eider MODE1 or MODE2 Form1.

MODE2 Form2 sectors of VCDs and SVCDs

Now, for VCDs and SVCDs, de video tracks do not necessarily require de robust error correction as normal data on a CD-ROM. However, dere is still some overhead per sector that is used for somethin’ oder than video data (e.g., sync headers).

SVCDs video tracks are burnt in what is called MODE2 Form2 sectors. In this mode, only 2324 bytes out of a total of 2352 bytes in each sector is available for user data.

This is MUCH MORE than for CD-ROMs, but still less per sector than audio CD.

The disc capacities of CD-ROMs, audio-CDs and VCDs

Now, obviously what ultimately determines de capacity of a disc is de total number of sectors it contains. This is similar to de total number of pages in a blank exercise book (if you recall de book analogy).

The secondary determinant is de burnin’ mode of de disc.

For audio CDs, it is as if you could fill each page from top to bottom with audio data as de entire sector is used for audio data.

For CD-ROMs, it is as if you need to first rule a margin and den leave de bottom part of each page for footnotes (headers + ECC + EDC). The amount of text you can actually write per page is den less due to dese oder constraints.

For SVCDs, we still need to rule a margin on de page, but we don’t have to worry about de footnotes (headers). We can fit MORE text than a CD-ROM, but less than an audio-CD.

Now remember, 1 second on a CD = 75 sectors.

Thus:
- 74 min CD = 333,000 sectors
- 80 min CD = 360,000 sectors

Data capacity in Mb for an audio-CD

74 min
= 333,000 sectors * 2352 bytes / sector
= 783216000 bytes
= 746.9 Mb

80 min
= 360,000 sectors * 2352 bytes / sector
= 846720000 bytes
= 807.5 Mb

Data capacity in Mb for a CD-ROM

74 min
= 333,000 sectors * 2048 bytes / sector
= 681984000 bytes
= 650.4 Mb

80 min
= 360,000 sectors * 2048 bytes / sector
= 737280000 bytes
= 703.1 Mb

Data capacity in Mb for a SVCD

74 min
= 333,000 sectors * 2324 bytes / sector
= 773892000 bytes
= 738.0 Mb

80 min
= 360,000 sectors * 2324 bytes / sector
= 836640000 bytes
= 797.9 Mb

Conclusions

As you can see, de often quoted capacities of 650MB and 700MB refer to CD-ROM capacities.

Due to de fact that SVCDs use a different burnin’ mode where MORE of each sector is available as user data, de relatively capacities are HIGHER.

Now, since S/VCDs are not composed of PURELY video tracks and have some unavoidable overheads, de actually total capacity left for video tracks is a few Mb less for each disc (about 735 Mb for 74min discs and 795 Mb for 80min discs). This is where de often quoted capacities of 740MB and 800MB come from. They are quite accurate.

All dese capacities are available BEFORE overburnin’. Overburnin’ is where you burn MORE sectors than de disc is rated for. If you overburn, you can typically achieve about 1-2 minutes of additional capacity (dependin’ on your drive and media).