Not all websites are created equal, many lack the proper coding required in order to be as SEO ready as they should be. In this section we’ll discuss what it takes to get your site moving towards the top of the ranking pile –from the proper use of your meta tags, to clearly identifying individual elements.
Working with the header portion of your html
Over the years, search engines have changed how they perceive the different elements found in the “<head>” portion of your pages. At a time, keywords stood in the same place that titles do now (as the most important meta element to seo). The state of keyword importance today is far from what it was; in fact they’ve become an almost ignored factor in your site’s overall searchability. Years of webmasters flooding pages with dozens of unrelated keywords, has forced companies like google to write them off entirely, or at least fairly close to it.
Note: In the above paragraph, we’re referring to “keywords” found in the actual keywords meta tag.
The title tag
There are several things you want to accomplish with the title tag, the most obvious of which is describing the page to your viewers. The key is in “how” you describe your page, don’t just grab a statement because it accurately summarizes the page –there are goals we want to accomplish with this element. In every title tag, there needs to be one key item from the page that follows it, and that is the most valuable “keyword” from the page’s text. You need to know your page, your industry, and your customers (viewers, readers, etc.), and you need to pluck a word out based on all these factors. This keyword should be the dominant presence on that page, so that google and all the other search engines find your content both relevant and straightforward. Here are some crucial elements to consider for every title tag.
Keyword themes
Each page should have a focus, an item, product, or keyword that dominates the content and space on the page. As mentioned above, this ensures that your page is relevant to the keywords you use (and we’ll get more in depth on keywords later in this guide).
Location
Location is important for those doing their business locally, in fact “important” may not even be a strong enough word.
More Keywords
We discussed the need to have your most valuable keyword in the title, but I wouldn’t stop there, the more keywords you can fit in the better (without going over-board). Consider looking through Google’s ranking pages, and see what people search for most often, just make sure to keep it all relevant. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that every word in your title tag appears elsewhere on the page.
Length
Your title needs to fall somewhere between a phrase and a sentence –too little and you’re missing out on easy opportunities, too long and you could get penalized as spam. It’s a fine balance, and sometimes hard to know when to draw the line. Read your title over, and see if it seems like a natural statement, or if it’s padded with uncomfortable keywords. The title should still read like an actual “title”, and as longs as you keep that in mind, you will likely be fine.
Company Name
Although some would say this portion is debatable, most experts agree that this has a positive influence on your overall visibility. Also up for debate is the placement of the name –should it be placed up front or in the back? At mediabanana.com, we typically place it in the back, as we feel dominance should be handed to the keywords. But again, the differences here are debatable, as long as you get it in there, you’re doing ok.
Descriptions
Your page’s description tag is probably the second most important element to its searchability, and is exactly what prospective customers will see while performing a search. When you enter a search on any of the major search engines, the information you see listed down the page are usually page titles and descriptions. It’s in these two elements that search engines pull most of their information, so it makes sense that they are the most important.
The key to writing great descriptions is simple, like the title tag, you need to include your most important keywords –and aside form that, simply summarize what the page is about. It’s also crucial that this portion of the header be very readable, it needs to come across as a well written summary that accurately describes the page. You may not believe it, but crawler software has become sensitive enough to take notice when meta tags are not relevant to the page content –and will penalize you if it’s not.
Note: It’s been said in this guide several times already, and will likely be said several more, but relevance is absolutely necessary in achieving your best results in SEO. Everything from external links to meta tags should contain relevant keywords, relevant to the page they focus on – NOT to search terms you simply want to be found with.”
Keywords
Keywords have gotten a bad rap in SEO through years of abuse, not too long ago, developers would flood each page with every keyword that they wanted to be found under. It’s because of this that search engines were forced to find better ways to bring their users more relevant results. People would search for “order flowers” and get anything from funeral homes, to gift shops.
Although search engines have begun focusing less and less on this element, it’s still worth investing some time in. Grab some keywords out of your content, and list them in the keywords meta tag –it generally doesn’t take long, and you don’t need to list more than half a dozen or so.
Other useful meta tags
Truth be told, the meta tags listed to this point are the only truly important ones required –but with the market so competitive, it never hurts to go the extra mile. There are literally dozens of other uses for your meta tags, more than we care to list here in detail. A full detailed guide of meta tag information can be found on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tag
SEO possibilities in the content
The meta tags are only a small step towards building an SEO friendly site; they are after all, only spices on the real meat of searchability. Within the content, are literally dozens of opportunities to improve your SEO –from header tags to image names.
Header tags
Easily the most looked at part of your page as far as crawler software is concerned, yet so many people fail to use them at all. Headers refer to the information found within the “<h1> - <h6>” html tags. Like the title tag, this element should include one or two of your most important keywords. The “H1” tag holds the position of most important here, while the rest hold a bit less, and a little less as you go up (H1 being the most important to H6 being the least important).
Images and image tags
We say “images” and “image tags” because these are a double sided opportunity, the image name itself and the html tag that calls upon it.
Image naming
The inexperienced developer is often caught up in naming images in a way that’s most convenient for sorting, but this is a huge mistake, and an even larger opportunity wasted. Image names should be relevant to what’s pictured, and maybe even contain a keyword if possible –but don’t go so far as to name something a non-relevant keyword just to squeeze one in, once again, ALWAYS go for relevance. Separate words in the image name with a simple dash “-“, and never leave spaces.
Image alt tag
The alt tag is important for many reasons, not just for SEO –it’s the text that appears when the image can’t be loaded. You can’t just assume that your images will always load properly; some browsers can even shut images off altogether. Aside from that, it’s also a great opportunity to get in another keyword, which again, needs to be relevant.
Image title tag
The last element to the image tag is the title, the description of the image that pops up when the mouse is hovering overhead. This one isn’t so much required as the alt tag, but is yet another chance to get in some more keywords. The title tag should consist of a simple sentence that accurately describes the image, the reason for the image, or what the image represents. The downside to the title tag is of course, the pop up that appears with the mouseover, it can distract from your site and cannot be turned off.
The effectiveness of this element is debatable, and should really only be used when you really want the mouseover title to appear.
Links
Writing links properly is one of the more unusual elements to SEO, as a link found on one page really helps the SEO on the linked page more. But aside from that, it is of course another chance to get in a keyword or two, so long as the two pages have some similar keywords.
Link title tag
This serves the same function as the image title tag.
Link text
Never write out “here” or “click here” as your link text, allow entire sentences to link to other pages. Instead of “Read more about our hosting services here” use the full text “Read more about our hosting services here”. By doing this you’re giving more strength to the next page, and increasing the relevance of both.
The actual content of the page
Obviously the hardest part of a page’s searchability, and the one that will likely have you pulling your hair out a 2:00 am –the content should actually be written with your keywords in mind. It’s not an entirely bad idea to research keywords and select the ones you need to focus on before ever putting any content down. You need to know your market, you need to know what keywords you can attract the most customers with, and don’t always go for the most obvious. Sometimes it’s best to focus on some keywords with less competition –the keyword “community” for instance, although it may match the site you’re putting together perfectly, you stand no chance of beating out sites like Myspace and Facebook. Therefore, you’ll never make it to the top of the list for that search term.
To wrap this section up, we’ll leave it with one word –RELEVANCE!
