SEO – Title Tags
The first step in setting up your SEO is to make sure
you have a title set for all of your pages. The title
of the page is between the <head></head> tags of your
document.
It looks like this:
<title>Your Page Title</title>
It’s important that every page on your site has a
relevant, targeted page title is important. You should
always focus on labeling your page titles so that they
can include a unique title tag consisting of your
target keywords, the phrases that you are hoping to
rank for.
Remember, whenever someone searches for something
within search engines like Google, the title of the
page appears as a clickable link, so you want to be
careful to include relevant keyword titles for every
page on your website.
Instead of just calling your index page “Your Domain
Name”, consider integrating your primary keyword within
the title.
For example, for our gold website, our main page could
include the title: Golf Guides And Training: Complete
Golf Resource Center
And an interior (sub) page featuring specs on clubs and
equipment could include the title “Gold Equipment
Reviews”.
If you have no page title at all, it will generally
show up as “Untitled Document” both within the search
engines and when people directly visit your website.
Most people aren’t going to click a link that says
“Untitled Document, are they?
You need to focus on using keywords that will directly
appeal to your target market.
Take a look at this:
Look at the top listing. Where it says “Dogpile Web
Search” is the title of the document.
Now, do you see this text below it?
“Dogpile Search & Rescue is expanding! Now help pets
at www.DoGreatGood.com. Dogpile. Al the best search
engines piled into one. All the best search engines …”
That is the description of the page. In addition to
setting your title, you should also include a
description.
Just include 3-4 sentences about your page, nothing too
long but make sure that you are summarizing your
website successfully, so that anyone reviewing this
snippet of text will undoubtedly understand what your
website is all about. If your description isn’t
available, Google will typically show a sample of text
from your page.
The title tag can be found in the head area of your
HTML document. It is placed between title tags, like
this:
<title>Your Website Page Title Goes Here </title>
The summary and description of your website dot not
often affect your actual search engine position
however, but simply provides a quick overview for
search engine users and spiders who crawl your website and index your pages.
In my experience it should consist of two keyword
phrases, each 2-4 words in length. I generally
separate the two phrases with a pipe symbol. This
symbol is usually found on the backslash key.
You can create the symbol by pressing SHIFT+Backslash.
It looks like this: |
So your title might look something like this:
Golf Lessons | Free Golf Tutorials
I like to find two related keyword phrases that
accurately describe the page content. Ideally, at
least one word from the first phrase will also appear
within the second one. As you see in my example,
“golf” is found in both phrases.
Page Content
The content of your page is very important to your
search rankings. While the quality of the content
itself isn’t necessarily a factor directly with
rankings, because the search engines can’t accurately
judge the quality of the content like a human can, in
another way it truly does make a difference. Here’s
how:
If the quality of your content is poor and untargeted
towards your market, you will find it difficult to not
only retain visitors that you generate from the search
engines, but it’s unlikely that external websites will
want to offer a back link to your site.
As we will discuss in the next section, back links are
critical to your search engine rankings. The better
your content is, the easier it will be to get the links
that will boost your rankings and help you maintain
your overall positioning.
The main thing you need to know about your page content
is that the old advice about keyword density is
outdated. In fact, It has been for many years. There
is no specific keyword density required to rank well.
In fact, you could theoretically rank for a phrase that
wasn’t even found on your page if you had links
pointing to the page with the phrase as anchor text!
Of course, it’s more likely that you will rank well if
you do have the phrase on the page at least twice. I
like to put it in H1 tags at the top of the page, as
well as once or twice in the actual content.
Just write naturally. If you need to repeat the phrase
six times on the page to get your point across, do so.
If you only need to stay it once, then say it once.
Write for your visitors, not search engines.
