Last week I covered the importance for setting up a search engine friendly architecture for your website. This week I’ll be explaining the basics of on-site search engine optimization.
Step 3: Your On-Site Optimization
Any search engine optimizer will tell you that the most important part of SEO is your off-site optimization strategy (covered next week), however your on-site optimization is still crucial to being found for your products and services. Think of it this way: if you don’t put what you do on your website how will the search engines know what you do.
Your on-site website optimization goes hand-in-hand with a search engine friendly website architecture (covered last week). If your website architecture is properly constructed your on-page efforts will be much more successful. There are a few HTML tags to optimize properly that are a must for every page on your website, they include the “title” tag, “meta description” tag and “h1” tag. I’ll go into detail about each one below.
The title tag of your website (also called the meta title) is the first thing a search engine will see to understand what that specific page is about. The title tag is what shows up at the very top of your browser window and is used when someone bookmarks your page. Having a well written title tag should be common sense if you are wanting your page to come up for that keyword, however many people overlook this and leave the default “Untitled Page” text in it. This is great if you want to rank for “untitled page” however I doubt that is what you want.
You might be asking yourself, “How do I write a good title tag?”, well there are few rules you should follow:
- First: Be Concise. You only have 70 characters that the search engines will respond to, so make them count.
- Second: Include Your Keyword. I can’t stress this enough, if you want to come up for “blue rolling widgets”, by all means put “blue rolling widgets” in your title tag. This won’t necessarily make you come up number 1 for that phrase but you’ll be in the running.
- Third: Include Synonyms. If people search for “blue rolling widgets” you can also try variations on those words such as “rolling widgets” “blue widgets” etc. Each of those are words that your potential customers may search for.
- Fourth: Be Local. If your business is locally based include your location. Most people that are searching for a local service or product will put in the region they want to find it in. Adding a local identifier to your title tag greatly increases your chances of getting found locally.
- Fifth: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible never duplicate a title tag on your website. This confuses the search engines when serving up searches to your website.
Next you should focus on the Meta Description tag. This tag is located in the head of the website. This tag doesn’t directly affect your page ranking as the title tag will, however it gives a nudge to Google as to what the page is about in case of a conflict return results. For example if you have two pages on your website talking about “blue widgets” and someone does a search for buying blue widgets. Google may not display the correct page because both pages are about the same topic. However if you populate your meta description tag properly the search engines will take that into consideration and display your buying blue widget page rather than a product detail page.
Again you may be asking yourself “What does a proper meta description tag look like?”, and just like the title tag there are some rules to follow:
- First: Be Concise. Again you have a limited amount of characters to use, about 150 for the description tag. The description tag gives you more flexibility with your writing as you can write in complete sentences.
- Second: Be Informational. Be sure to describe what someone would see on the page. For our blue widget example above our meta description tag could look something like this: “Buy blue widgets from ABC company, a provider of blue widgets to Anytown USA since 1988”.
- Third: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible write a unique description tag for every page on your website. This helps tell Google what each page is about and gives them the ability to offer your customers the correct information.
The next tag you should focus on would be your H1 tag. The H1 tag is similar to the chapter heading in a book. It tells you what the entire section is about. H2 – H6 tags are for sub-headings and breaking up content logically on the page. From what I have seen the H1 tag has similar power as the title tag in the ranking algorithms of Google and other search engines, so having a well optimized title tag is important.
As with the title tag and meta description tag you may be asking yourself “How do I write an H1 tag?”, similar to the title and meta description tag the H1 tag also has some rules to apply:
- First: Only One Time. Each page on your site must contain only one H1 tag. If you cannot describe the entire page with one overall idea you need to split your content into additional pages until that can be completed. Sub-headings are great to use and give direction as to what is important on the pages.
- Second: Be Concise. The H1 doesn’t have a limit per-se however people should easily be able to tell what the page is about by reading it. I try to keep my H1 tags around the same length as the title tag.
- Third: Include Your Keyword. As with the title tag leaving the H1 tag blank or not including one on your site is hurting your chances at ranking well for your desired keyword.
- Fourth: Don’t Duplicate. This actually is important for two reasons, you don’t want to have the same H1 tag across multiple pages and you don’t want to just copy your web page title tag. The H1 tag should compliment your title tag.
So to recap, your on-site website optimization is a critical step in making sure you are well optimized. Having well written title, description and H1 tags give Google a good understanding of what your website is about, making it easier for them to give your users the correct page on your website. Since the title and H1 tags are both factored into the search engine algorithms using them properly is of great importance.
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