As of the writing of this post, Google reports that there are 644 million active websites on the internet. That’s a whole lot of websites! That begs the question, how do you make your website stand out?
Well, that’s a question keeping many a marketer up at night! But we can start here: Search Engine Optimization. Here are 4 SEO basics that you must know to get your website ranking and rating well.
(Back it up? Click here to read about what this SEO business is all about.)
The Meta Title tag, also known as the title tag, is a tag within the code that defines the particular page you are visiting. It is not visible on the front facing part of your website and is in the code only. Google uses this as the title in their search results as well as a big fat clue to what this page is about.
Title tags should be aroud 50-60 characters in length. They should contain keywords and be unique for each page. They are also often used in social media sharing.
The Meta Description tag is used similarly to the Meta title tag. It differs in that instead of a short 50 character title, it is a paragraph of text. They are shown in search engine result below the title. They are generally 150-160 characters and will truncate if they are longer than that.
Interested to find out what your title and description tags are? Well, you can look in the code. To find the title tags in the code, you need to view the raw HTML of the page. Your browser should have a “View Source” link. Use this and look for the words between
(Sidebar: Schedule yourself a free project consult and we’ll help you find them. 🙂
Both the title and the description tag should be different for each page. This broadens your searchability. If you have more than one keyword in the title or meta tag, put them in order of importance.
This tag has fallen to ill repute in the last few years. Nonetheless, we still usually add it to our pages. This is just what it sounds like: a list of all relevant keywords for each page.
(Read here if you want to learn how to choose keywords.)
This April, Google is rolling out a new algorithm that will rank a website’s mobile friendliness. As of now, it is a “yes” or “no” answer. Nonetheless, this is setting a huge presendence in how important mobile website optimization is.
Check out how your rank with Google’s Mobile Optimization Tool.
It’s important to understand how a search engine works when looking at your site from their perspective. Search engines are bots that scan the internet, reading the source code of each page they can find. They are not able to scan images, Adobe Flash animation or video. The main source of your ranking will come from the text based content on the page. This is a common mistake that I see. Your website should have at least 300 words of content on the page, particularly the home page.
SEO is marketing for your website. These 4 elements are the basics to put your site on the map but SEO doesn’t stop here. Just like any marketing, it should be hand tailored to your business or website. We can help with that! Schedule a time to sit down with our SEO experts and talk about how to improve your website’s conversions.
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