This is the third in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics. Yesterday we talked about the coding of your website. Today we’re going to talk about the on-page content, including the meta tags.
There are essentially four parts to the on-page content of your website.
They are:
Title
The Title tag is a meta tag, which means it is not usually seen as part of the content a typical user would see. However, the Title tag shows up at the top of your browser when a page is loaded. Behind the URL itself, I believe the Title tag is probably the most important element of on-page optimization. This Title tag tells the search engines what this page is all about. The Title tag is also what shows up as a link to your website in search results. In the image below, from a Google search, the text highlighted in green is the Title tag.
Description
The Description tag is also a meta tag. It is basically a short description of the content the reader can expect to find when they click through to your site. In the image above it is the text right below the Title tag. Typically about 160 characters will show up in the search results. So the best way to take advantage of that is to make your description compelling so that searchers will be enticed to click through to your site. In our example above it simply tells who we are.
Keywords
The Keywords tag is also a meta tag. Because this tag got so much abuse in the past, most of the major search engines simply ignore it today, but there are some that still look at it to pick up keywords that may not be replicated exactly in your content.
Content
This is the juicy part and what all of your human readers visit your site for. The content is exactly that; your article, your blog post, your video, your pictures. They all make up the on-page content of your website. Your content can be really long or really short. Ideally you should have about 500 words per page at a minimum. If you are posting to a blog sometimes that’s a little much. The key is to have unique content about a few keywords so that your content can rank well for those keywords. If you try to put too much information on one page it won’t rank well for any of it.
Take this series of articles for example. I broke it out into an introduction and four follow up posts so that each one could focus on one aspect of search engine optimization. Take a lesson from that.
When all four of these elements are in sync you can rank really well for your chosen keywords. If there is a lot of competition it may take a little longer, but it can still be done. You will just need to work on getting more incoming links to those pages.
Tomorrow we are going to talk about Link Popularity.
To your success,
Ken Partain
Not all code is created equal!
This is the second in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.
One of the strongest factors of a website that ranks well is the code itself. This is something that most small business owners never even consider. If a site looks good, as far as they are concerned, it’s a good site.
However, the coding plays a big part in how well your website ranks in the search engines. If your site has a lot of unnecessary code to compensate for lack of technical ability on the part of your web designer, that can cause a problem.
I see this alot with small companies who sign up for cheap web sites because they can build it themselves. The companies offering such sites have done so many things to make the sites dummy proof that there is an extremely high amount of unnecessary code. This is true for scripts as well. Scripts are small (sometimes not so small) pieces of code that make a site function a certain way.
Every bit of code and every script that is required to make your site function properly can potentially slow down the amount of time it takes for your site to load. Site load time has always been a factor in rankings, but just recently Google made an announcement that page load times are going to be a bigger factor in rankings and have even provided some tools in Webmaster Tools so that site owners can measure their page load times and take steps to improve it. Keep in mind that if your site is built on one of the do-it-yourself platforms mentioned above that you will have little to no control over these factors.
Our own site is built on the WordPress platform, which, in my opinion, is a very well coded system. It is an open-source platform so there are literally thousands of programmers around the world working on it every day to make it better. Every site we have built on the WordPress platform performs significantly better in search results, even than the sites we had previously optimized on other platforms.
It just takes a few seconds to look at a site and tell if there are issues with bloated code. Give me a call or send me an email and I’ll be glad to take a quick look at your site.
If you would like to know all the other factors affecting your rankings, you may want to consider our Comprehensive Website Marketing Analysis.
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about your on-page content as a ranking factor.
To your success!
Ken Partain
Clienst and prospects alike have been asking me about some of the real-time search functionality being built into Google and Bing. Google announced today that real-time search is available to some and will be rolled out to all of their data centers over the next few days.
Here’s a video from Google with some examples of how this works.
I originally found this breaking news on Mashable. Click through for more details. This latest change is one of the biggest reasons I have been encouraging my clients to get involved with social media even just a little bit. With real-time search results at the top of the search results I expect that the local map listings will be below that and the top 10 organic (or natural) search results will be pushed even further down the page.
This is why you not only need to work on optimizing your web site, but you need to work on a complete online marketing strategy so that your information shows up no matter where people look.
This is not the only change coming so if you need some help preparing yourself, give us a call. I’d be glad to work with you to get your company to the top of the search engines.
To your success!
Ken Partain
Watching one of my favorite movies this weekend, Hoosiers, with Gene Hackman, I was reminded that the same thing that applies to basketball, practicing the fundamentals like dribbling, passing and shooting free-throws, also applies to SEO.
In SEO, the fundamentals are just a little bit different. When optimizing your web site there are essentially four main ranking factors, 1) the coding of your site, 2) the on-page content, including the meta tags, 3) your link popularity, or how many other, related sites are linking to yours, and 4) your traffic.
All of these factors play a role in how well your site ranks overall, although some will have a greater impact on your rankings. Also, some of these you have a great deal of control over and others you don’t.
Throughout this week I’m going to dig a little deeper into each one of these factors. I hope you will follow along.
To your success,
Ken Partain
Mobile marketing hasn’t really taken off here in the United States like it has in other parts of the world. I personally thought we would see a lot more of it than we have.
However, with the proliferation of the iPhone and other smart phones, it’s important that people be able to find your site and read it easily on their mobile device.
Our site is built on the WordPress platform, but I have a plug-in from Mofuse installed that shows a mobile version of our site if a visitor is using a mobile device. It basically renders our RSS feed so that it downloads quickly and easily and is formatted so that it is easy to read.
If you don’t have a website, or you don’t have one that you can use the WordPress plug-in for, you can still set up your very own mobile website in no time at all and for very little money.
Check out the Mofuse website and if you get stuck and need any help, give me a call or shoot me an email.
To your success,
Ken Partain
