Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – You’ve Selected Your Keywords, Now What? Writing Titles and Descriptions
As a step towards helping customers drive traffic to their web site, we will break down the search engine optimization process into manageable tasks over a series of newsletters to help you understand this process and to help you implement SEO tactics. In our last newsletter we provided basic steps for selecting the right keywords. If you’d like to revisit the first article, go to http://www.concentric.com/blog/?page_id=8 . In this article, we’ll review guidelines for optimizing your HTML code so that the search engines begin to associate the keywords you’ve selected with your web site.
As discussed in our last newsletter, the keyword selection process is an important one and can take some time. Before we look at how to use the keywords you selected to optimize your HTML code, let’s recap on the final steps for selecting the right keywords. You will need to have this completed before optimizing your HTML code.
Based on competitive analysis and keyword analysis tools, the final steps to selecting the right keywords include:
- Select a list of keywords for your business from the analysis conducted. This is normally between 50-100 keywords or keyword phrases.
- Select the top 10 pages of your web site (or all pages if less than 10).
- Assign the various keywords to the pages of your website based upon content, theme, and subject matter. Group similar keywords and keyword phrases together, such as “key chains”, “fun key chains”, “metal key chains”. 3-6 keywords per web page is optimal.
With this list in hand, you can now move to the next phase of search engine optimization and begin to optimize your HTML code. This will include how to write Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Meta Keywords so that the search engines begin to associate these keywords with your web site.
Writing and Optimizing Title Tags:
Title tags appear as text that is shown at the top border of the browser. This is very important text as search engines place a high level of importance on keywords found in the title tag.
What it looks like in the HTML code:
<title>Your Title Tag - learn to optimize your title tag</title>
Where it belongs:
The correct placement for the title tag is between the <head> and </head> tags within the HTML the makes up your page.
Tag limits:
We recommend that your title tag be between 50-100 characters long - including spaces. The various search engines accept different length title tags, but as long as you keep within this limit you should be ok.
Title tag tips:
- Include the keywords/keyword phrases you’ve assigned to the page, but don’t use any keyword or phrase more than twice.
- Create an enticing title that promotes the key aspects of your business based on the keywords you’ve selected and assigned to the page. For instance, if you’ve selected “key chains”, “fun key chains”, “metal key chains” as the most important keyword phrases for your homepage, an example title tag would be “Key chains including fun and metal key chains.”
- Your title tag should include your keyword phrases while remaining as close to a readable sentence as possible.
- Each page of your site should have its own title tag with its own keywords that relate to that specific page.
Writing and Optimizing Page Text:
The content of each page is also used by search engines, and the total text of the page is nearly as important as the title tag. Words and phrases on each page will lead to hits in the engine, so important keywords and phrases should occur within the page content as well as the tags.
Page text tips:
- The amount of content you write needs to contain the keyword phrases you are optimizing for. One rule of thumb is to have at least 200 words of text. Of course, there are cases where this much text can be difficult to include on one page, but it does positively impact your search engine ranking.
- This text should include your most important keyword phrases repeated 1-2 times, and should remain logical and readable.
- This text should be unique! Unique to each page within your site and definitely unique compared to your competition.
- Add additional text-filled pages to your site. For example, “how-to” articles, tips, or tutorials (even newsletters) fill that need. Make sure these pages link to other parts of your site so that hits on this content draws a visitor further along.
Writing and Optimizing Alt and Meta Tags:
Alt tags (or image alt attributes) put words to the images on your web page. If you scroll over images on a web page, a text box will often appear. This is the Alt tag. While not as critical as the Title tag or overall content, search engines do crawl the text in the Alt tag as they do other content on your site. Alt tags should normally be 4-5 words, no more than one sentence, and reference one of the keywords or keyword phrases.
Meta tags are also important for improving your listings in the search engines. They are inserted into the “HEAD” area of your web pages, similar to the title tag. There are two common types of meta tags, meta keywords tag and meta description tag.
The meta keywords tag is useful as a way to reinforce the keywords. For instance, using our key chain example, if you had a page about key chains — and you say the words “key chains” at various places in your body copy — then mentioning the words “key chains” in the meta keywords tag might help boost your page a bit higher for those words.
The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag. The description may appear in the search results to describe your web site. An easy way to do this is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.
Here is a sample of the meta tags using our key chain phrases as an example:
<head>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Key chains, Fun key chains, Metal key chains.”> </meta>
<meta name=”description” content=”Key chains including fun and metal key chains.”>
</meta>
You’ve just completed another critical step in optimizing your site for search engine results.