By now, everyone has at least heard about search engine optimization. Unfortunately, there is a lot of information, a great deal of misinformation and everyone wants to rank number one. So where do you start? What are some best practices that you can begin yourself?
Below are some helpful tips, but understand, search engine optimization is a very complex science, these tips will help you in your efforts, but we make no promises in terms of gaining rank. Every keyword phrase is a different market and SEO efforts need to reflect that. If you have questions about SEO and what Smart Solutions can do for you,contact us.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is extremely important. You need to know what people are typing into the search bars of search engines when they are looking for the product or service you provide. Perform thorough keyword research before you begin your SEO efforts. At Smart Solutions, the keyword research tool we like to use is:
keyworddiscovery.com
2. Title Tag
We cannot stress to you how important your page’s title tags are. The purpose of this tag is to summarize the page’s content. Your title tag is the descriptor of your web page, just like the title to a book is the descriptor of the book. The title tag often gets the most attention in the search engine results. The title tag is used by both the search engines and humans to determine what is to follow on each of your website page. In most search engines results, your title tag is shown as the first line and is underlined. It is also displayed in the browser title bar.
Basic rules to get started with:
· Every page on your website needs to have a unique title tag.
· As a general rule your title tag should be 6 to 12 words.
· Including spaces, you should have 60 to 70 characters in your title.
· The keyword phrase you have selected for the page should be toward the beginning of the title.
· Tile tags should be written as a sentence and be understandable to a human.
· Do not repeat words.
How to update your Title tags on the Smart Solutions’ Content Management System:
· Log onto your website’s admin area and select the menu and page editor function.
· Select the pencil icon next to any page that you wish to update the title tag.
· In the field titled, "Window Title (<Title>)" type in your title.
· Keep in mind that you want the copy to be an engaging description of your website page.
3. Description Tag
The description tag is the introduction to your web page’s content. Most books and research papers have an introduction, where the author gives their readers some background that is helpful in deciding whether they would like to read on. You should treat your description tags the same.
The keyword phrases that are located in you title tag need to also be in your description tag. This tag should be written in sentence form and easily understood by a human. The description tag is sometimes shown in the search engine results under the title tag; making this tag important for both the search engines and your potential visitors.
Basic rules to get started with:
· Every page on your websites needs to have a unique description tag.
· As a general rule, your description tag should be 12 to 24 words.
· The keywords you have selected for the page should be in the beginning of the description.
· Description tags should be written as a sentence and be understandable to a human.
· Do not repeat words over 2 times.
· Generally one or two sentences long.
How to update your Description tags on the Smart Solutions’ Content Management System:
· Log onto your website’s admin area and select the menu and page editor function.
· Select the pencil icon next to any page that you wish to update the description tag.
· You will need to click on the button named "Appearance" at the top of the Edit Section Page.
· In the field titled, Section HTML Header, type in your keywords after, <META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” Content=”your description tag here”.
· Keep in mind that you want to use only keywords that are found within your page’s text.
4. Keywords Tag
Every page on your website should have a unique keyword tag. The purpose of this tag is to reinforce the keywords that are on your web page. For instance, if your page is about search engine optimization and the phrase search engine optimization appears multiple times in your body copy, then putting search engine optimization into your keyword tag might help boost your page for the phrase search engine optimization.
The keyword tag should include all of the keywords that you are optimizing your page for, longest keywords first. This tag should not be written in sentence form, but as a list. Your keywords should have the first word capitalize and be separated by commas. An example would be:
<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” Content=”Search engine optimization, Search engine friendly website, Search engine placement, Search engine marketing, SEO, SEM”
The keywords tag is also used as the location for common misspellings of your keywords. By placing common misspellings of your keywords into the keyword tag, you are enabling the spiders to crawl them without your human visitors having to see them. For example, in the case of website, you would want to include Web site in your keywords tag for searches that spell it correctly.
Of the tags mentioned above, the keyword tag has the least impact on your SEO efforts. Never the less, it is best practice to have all of your tags written properly, no matter the affect they have on your search engine rankings.
Basic rules to get started with:
· No sentences – phrases only
· Longest keyword first
· Capitalize the first word in the keyword
· Separate your keywords with commas
· Repeat no phrases and only repeat any word a maximum of four times
· In general, your keyword tag should be 24 to 48 words.
How to update your keyword tag in the Smart Solutions’ Content Management System:
· Log onto your website’s admin area and select the menu and page editor function.
· Select the pencil icon next to any page that you wish to update the keyword tag.
· You will need to click on the link Appearance at the top of the Edit Section Page.
· In the field titled, Section HTML Header, type in your keywords after, <META NAME=”KEYWORDS” Content=”your keywords here”.
· Keep in mind that you want to use only keywords that are found within your page’s text.
Updating all of your website’s title tags, description tags and keyword tags so that they are unique to that specific page will help you pave the way for your SEO campaign. Do not forget that the keyword phrases that you are optimizing each of your website pages for need to be repeated within all four areas of each page: title tag, description, keywords and body content.
If you have questions or would like to receive a search engine optimization quote please contact us today.