Everyone would like their website to be found. Whether it’s your business, your personal blog, or anything in between; one of the most important ways to be found is through Search Engines. Why is that so important? Imagine your business sold Vacuum Cleaners and someone went to a Search Engine with the intent to buy a Vacuum.
You’d want to be the first in line when they made that search wouldn’t you? Visibility to qualified visitors is key to any businesses success online. Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing a website for maximum visibility in a Search Engine. Whenever you create a new page on your website there are some key elements you want to address to maximize your exposure.
The Title Tag
Probably the single more important piece of the puzzle is your Title Tag. It tells Search Engines what your page is about and it is also your first chance to convince a visitor to click on your listing instead of the other ten on the page (plus all the paid ads!).
Every page you make for your website should have a goal and a reason why a visitor would want to view that page. If you’re selling Vacuum Cleaners online then you’re goal is going to be to target visitors that want to buy them. So the broad topic of the page is Vacuum Cleaners and more specifically you’re looking for visitors that want to buy them online. In your title tag you might want to include those keywords (buy vacuums online) in some fashion in your title tag:
Now the key to getting this right isn’t to just slap your keywords in the Title Tag and move on but to include a Call To Action, or a statement that invokes emotion and encourages a visitor to click on your search result over all the others. Also note that Google will cut off your Title Tag after 70 characters to it’s best to keep it below that number.
Meta Tags
To supplement the Title Tags on your new page are the Meta Tags. While they no longer contribute as a ranking signal in the major search engines they are still a very powerful way to increase the number of click through’s in the SERPs (search engine results page) by having a well crafted description. The two main meta tags are the description and keywords. Most people overlook or purposefully ignore these two tags because they think they’re not important. While the keyword tags have no bearing on your results in the major search engines, they may be used by other web directories so it doesn’t hurt to take a few moments to add some (don’t go overboard!!) keywords for this meta tag.
The meta description can mean the difference between someone clicking on your listing over the one right below yours. Most people will skip writing the description when using software like WordPress because it is not readily visible when you are making a post and some SEO plugins will offer you an easy way out and auto generate the description for you. If you want your listing to stand out you should take a minute and write a compelling description yourself that summarizes the content on the page to bring visitors in. Make sure you keep the description between 155 and 160 characters as it will generally get cut off after that.
Heading Tags
Probably the second most important element on the page are your Heading Tags. The H1 through H6 tags on a page are there for you to lets Search Engines know what keywords you think are topically important and lets you structure them from most important (H1) to least important (H6). As a general rule of thumb you should only have one H1 tag per page and it should contain the topic most relevant and most important to the current page. So if you’re selling Vacuum Cleaners online you want to make sure that is included in the focus of your keyword. There can be multiple H2 and H3 tags that contain terms that supplement your main topic. They might include major styles of Vacuum Cleaners you’re selling or even the different brands of Vacuum Cleaners.
Content
The last topic I wanted to cover is the content. These days many people say that “Content is King” and I’m a believer in this as well. SEO is no longer about making sure that you include the keywords you’re trying to rank for in your content at a very specific percentage rate. The content of the page should be relevant, highly informative and as with every other item in this post it should be compelling. SEO’s are not just robots that pump out content full of keywords anymore, we have to be Marketer’s and we have to know how to sell our products to our visitors if we want to be successful.
Important Note: For any SEO considerations you make for your website the most important consideration to make is the Usability of your website. Do NOT make decisions just for Search Engines, make them because if is going to enhance the experience of the visitor to your website.
