Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the Series – Part I: It’s All in Your Head
ByAccording to recent estimations the World Wide Web contains over 100 million websites. With numbers like that, it’s no wonder why search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever. But, unlike Kevin Costner’s character in “Field of Dreams,” simply building it doesn’t mean they’ll come – website visitors, that is. There’s more to being popular online than designing and publishing an eye-appealing website.
This post is one in a series of three that will help expose how some achieve high organic search engine rankings while others fall short of that mark. Organic SEO means spending time, patience and a little know-how versus money for pay-per-click campaigns. Success starts with appropriate and descriptive tags and coding in the HTML.
For the intents and purposes of this post, let’s use a fictitious company called Wow Business Support (WBS). WBS specializes in business support services and is physically located in Toronto, Ontario.
First, and perhaps most importantly, each page of your website needs to have a unique and accurate Title, a good Description, and appropriate Keywords and phrases in the HTML within the head tags.
<html>
<head>
<title> Wow Business Support, Inc. – Administrative Assistance – Desktop Publishing – Web Design – Toronto, Ontario </title>
<meta content=”Wow Business Support, Inc., located in Toronto, Ontario, is a business support and creative assistance firm specializing in administrative assistance, desktop publishing and web design, serving small-business owners.”/>
<meta content=”administrative assistance, desktop publishing, web design, service, virtual assistant, toronto ontario, canada, outsource, freelance, office support, word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, data entry, typing, brochures, newsletters, website, webmaster” />
</head>
<body>
Note that the title includes the company name, three of the company’s key service areas, and where the company is located. The description is written in sentence form and gives more information about the business. The keywords listed include services offered, where the company is located, and other descriptors.
It is important to use popular keywords, but concentrate more on how appropriate each keyword is for each page versus the keywords’ popularity. Also, do not spam the keywords by repeating popular keywords over and over again. The search engines will penalize your site for this.
NOTE: You can research keyword popularity by visiting https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
To summarize:
- The title tag should accurately describe each web page and be unique for each page – descriptive without being too lengthy.
- The description tag should be a summary of the page and should be kept to one or two sentences, but never more than a brief paragraph. This is what will appear in the search engine results, right after your web page title.
- The keywords should be unique to each page of your site and accurately describe what the visitor will find on each page. Using strong keywords in your title and description will further enhance your search engine ranking.
Finally, it is worth noting that the URLs and file names you choose can have a great impact on being found by the search engines and listed higher in their rankings (e.g., using wowbusinesssupport.com might help them be discovered more quickly than if they used wbs.com). Further, using a file name like wowbusinesssupport.com/filename1.html for their “About Us” page isn’t as good as wowbusinesssupport.com/about.html.
In the next post of this series, we’ll take a look at the importance of page content between the body tags.
Search engine optimization is of paramount importance nowadays and this post clearly explains how it should be effectively implemented using a properly designed website. The role of keywords , titles and descriptions are so critical.
Sean Abraham