Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Use of the Title tag <title>
The Meta tags
Meta Keywords
Meta Description
Use Headings H1 - H6
The Title and Alt Attributes
Frames
Use of the Title tag <title>
The title is the text that is visible in the browsers title bar. And it is also the text that will represent your website in the search results. I think you already use the title tag, but do you use it in a good way? You should not have the same title tag on all your pages. A separate title on every page helps your search engine position and it will tell people what really is on every page. Don't just have your company name in the title. Use some keywords, the name of the page, the section it is in etc. It must encourage people to visit your website, or possibly continue reading your description. Roger Johansson writes in this article that this is is probably the best model for a title:
<title>Document title | Section name | Site or company name</title>
It should be situated between <head> and </head>
The Meta tags
There are two important meta tags, keywords and description. Keywords are just keywords separated by ",". Description should be a brief description of your website, and also include important keywords. The keywords and description should like the title be different for each page of your website! Read about keywords and description below. All meta tags should be situated between <head> and </head>. There are also two other meta tags that could be interesting.
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
Index and noindex specifies if the page should be indexed or not by search engines. Follow and nofollow specifies if the search engine should follow the links on the page or not.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="7" />
The meta revisit-after tag specifies how often the search engines should visit the page and update the index. It is specified by days, so the example code would make the search engine visit the website once every week.
Meta Keywords
If your website for example is about cars. To use the keyword "cars" is very logical, and you can do so. But you should be more specific. Maybe "20th century cars" could be a good "key phrase" if your website is about that. You can also use common misspelled words.
<meta name="keywords" content="20th century cars, cars" />
Meta Description
This is quite important, as many search engines will show this text in the results below the title. But some does not, instead the grab a piece of text from your website, it could be the first visible text, or text that matches your search query. However, when you have a good title, it's a high chance that people will read the description. So you better have a good description. It should include many keywords, but don't repeat them to much, or you may get banned from the search engines. Try to write the description so it encourages people to visit your website.
<meta name="description" content="A website with photos and information on 20th century cars." />
Use Headings H1 - H6
When you want big text use H1-H6. These are the tags that should be used for big text, and search engines will care more for what text is inside these, so put as many keywords as you can inside these. If you now are using e.g <div>, <p> or <span> and using classes or id:s for these, you should consider changing to H1-H6. Of course you can change the looks of these tags within your css too.
The Title and Alt Attributes
Most people know what the alt attribute is, but not many are using it, and some just have it empty to get valid html. However, it's a description for images. So if the user has disabled images or is using a browser that doesn't support images, this text will be shown instead. Search engines sees websites without images and will see this text instead. Internet Explorer shows the alt text when you point your mouse over the image, but that's NOT what it's created for. The title attribute is used for that. The title attribute works also like a description for the tag, and could happily be used on almost every tag, if not all. <a>, <h1> and <img> as examples.
Frames
There are ways to optimize a site that uses frames. But frames are so old and bad to use so consider changing you layout/navigation to not use frames! Why you should not use frames.
1. You index page is probably the framset, which contains not so much text, and it won't look interesting for search engines.
2. None of your pages has the navigation when found trough a search engine.
3. Sites that uses frames are slower to load as more http requests are needed.
4. There are surely much more reasons why not to use frames.