You know that content is king in SEO, and writing a unique, informative and interesting posts is a must for both of your blog and website. Now, your next task is to maximize those contents and make it more competitive. You must have read in various SEO tutorials and training materials that there are no hard and fast rules in optimizing your website, but there are surefire ways to make effective internet marketing for your business site.
The Basics such as getting the right keywords to optimize on, targeting those keywords and make them appear naturally and some techniques of blogging. Yes, my friend, you’ve to learn some technical things to properly optimize your business site, such as basic HTML codes, making effective resource box, and utilizing ‘Page Title Tag, Keyword Meta Tag, Description Meta Tag, Heading Tags (h1 to h6), Phrase Elements and Alt Attributes.
It’s easy to get distracted from the basics, especially if you’re presently delved into developing your site and try to copy what the professionals do. But like in any other fields, there are basic things you can’t afford to miss, and you have to set them all right from the start. You don’t have to be a professional to be able to maximize the basics of SEO, lots of open-source blogging platform such as WordPress, offer various tools to help you optimize your site. Here are some basics in SEO you should not miss:
The Page Title Tag
Title Tag plays a crucial function for optimization, but it’s also one of the most overlooked aspects of blogging for SEO. Title Tag defines the page and shows search engine crawlers for the basic information about the page. Thus, it is really important that you include the information you like to show to your visitors, such as title written inside the codes <title></title> tags and <head></head> tags.
Depending on the browser your visitors use, Title tags are shown at the top-left position of the screen, or at the right tab part. In the main page of Search engine results page, titles are shown along with the main heading and a clickable link.
Every page of your website should be unique, thus you should have a different title tag for each of your pages too. The best way to utilize the title tag is through including keywords but make sure you use only those relevant ones. Try to omit words that can make your title tag long such as ‘a, of, and, the, etc.’ and limit your characters into 70, going over this will do no good to your page.
You know that Page Title Tags are important for every page of your site, but optimization doesn’t end there, as you have to fill more boxes to boost the potential of each page or post you make for your business site.
Yes, you can always pay for SEO services to help your site, but it would be much better that you understand the idea of optimization before you seek any professional help. Besides, Search Engine Optimization is not rocket science, and don’t need to be an expert to understand the basics and even learn advanced optimization. But there are certainly lots of things you should do. This blog will talk about the remaining boxes you need to fill in in your blog site; the Keywords Meta Tag and Description Meta Tag.
Keywords Meta Tag
By now, you should understand how important getting the right keywords for targeting the right audience in your pages. The idea of Keywords Meta Tag’s function, on the other hand, is a bit far from targeted keywords, as it describes only your page content.
For years, Keywords Meta Tags has been used as part of the algorithm used by search engines in determining the rankings websites, but it has been ditched by the major search engines after discovering quite a lot of abuse by webmasters. Now, search engines spiders crawl for this as part of the search, which still holds a valuable weight for your optimization.
Keywords Meta tags should contain 3 to 8 keywords/ keyphrases and should be separated by commas. Each keyword should be used at least once in the content or web page. Utilize this area without abusing, and you will certainly help your pages get its deserved recognition.
Description Meta Tag
From the word ‘description,’ this aspect of optimization is used to describe your every post or web pages. Thus, your description should be clear and straightforward, as it’s not just for search engines, but more importantly, for real users.
The importance of description Meta tag has been decreased in the past couple of years in some minor search engines, but never forget that even these minor search engines can help you in so many ways, so take advantage of every little thing you can get. Description Meta tag is displayed along with the title in the SERP.
Description Meta tag should contain a minimum of 50 to a maximum of 200 characters, 160 characters is the idea, Google only displays 154, while some display more or less than that. Your Description tag should be interesting to attract users and convert them from visitors to clients.
You have set your Title tag, Keyword Meta tag and Description Meta tag, what’s next? The next boxes are as important as the first three mentioned above, and as I’ve said before, utilize every small thing to make up the bigger picture.
The Heading Tags (h1 – h6)
Heading tags are recognized by both human users and search engine crawlers. For search engines, headings help web crawlers to identify the page, but of course, it should be used properly. Meaning, tags should be in proper order h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. Using too many h1 tags in a single page or post can be penalized by search engines.
Real human users, on the other hand, recognize heading tags as a hierarchical system. Meaning, h1 tags should always appear in the page along with the targeted keywords and keyword phrases, and of course, with relevance to the products and services being discussed in the entry. H1 tag should be followed by h2, h3, etc., depending on the number of headings you need for your content.
Phrase Elements
Highlighting the important elements inside your post using HTML codes such as <em></em> and <strong></strong> will help put better emphasis on your keywords and key phrases, and this can be very beneficial for both search engine crawlers and human readers. Old tagging codes like <i></i> and <b></b> no longer show impact for search engines, this is why you should use <strong> and <em> to put more weight on words you want to optimize inside your page.
The Alt Attributes
Alt tags were originally used to help increase the density of the keywords in web pages. However, like many aspects of SEO, this too has been overused and abused by many web developers in the past, causing search engines to penalize sites and abolish the recognition of these parts for the rankings.
Now, the use of Alt attributes is to help describe images. Images get crawled by search engines spiders too, and if you wish to add pictures in your entries, filling up the alt attribute box with description can put more weight on your posts.
