Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of building and optimizing your website with certain principles and strategies in order to obtain the best possible rankings in the free search results, or “organic” search results. You website can always be re-optimized, so its never a perfect science or done, but there are certain pieces of the puzzle that need to be in place to achieve better search rankings. Over time, your goal should be to have really well optimized site that continues to grow and build more traffic through expansion of original content. With this strategy, you can expect to increase your website’s traffic over time as the site grows larger and larger.
Here are some of the key SEO principles you should focus on:
Meta-tags: Your meta-tags should be present in each page of your site starting from the homepage. They are located in the code or HTML of each page and can be customized on a per-page level. You can view a pages meta-tags by right clicking on the web page in any white area and selecting view source from the pop-up menu. There are generally 3 important meta-tags: Title tag, Keywords tag, and Description tag. If you are able to edit the meta-tags on each page of your site, through an admin or editing the HTML by hand, you can really customize each page’s meta-tags to focus in on describing the pages exact purpose. The more focused the better. If you have a blog you may not have the ability to edit the meta-tags on each page/post. You may have to use plugins to achieve individual page meta-tag editing with blogs.
Here is an example is well done meta-tags for a florist directory site:
Each and every page of your website can have custom meta-tags and should be optimized individually if possible. You can tweak your meta-tags to try to get the best result and rankings, but the changes may take from weeks to months to show positive results in Google so you have to have patience for the results. If your website is updated frequently with new content, it’s like the search engines are returning frequently, so the updates to the meta-tags and on-page content could yield improvements quicker than a less frequently updated website.
So what does each section of this tag do exactly?
Title Tag: Probably the most important, make sure every page Title in the meta-tags is unique to every page and very focused on what the page is about. Try to make your page titles corresponding to what people are searching for most frequently as it relates to your site and what it’s about.
Description: This provides search engine spiders with a brief overview of what your site is about. Your description tag is somewhat like a thesis for your website. It should be short, but very informative about what your site discusses. Always remember to include relevant keywords in your description, but don’t over do the amount of the same keywords.
Keywords: A list of ten or so keywords that are very relevant to what your site offers. If you are unsure of what keywords to include in this tag, check to see what keywords in your niche get the most search volume.
You can do this using the WordTracker free tool located at: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ or the Google External Keyword Tool: https://adwords.goog…rdToolExternal.
The robots and revisit-after tag talks directly to the search engine spiders that crawl your site. You want to use these tags to clearly indicate to them that they should index your entire website, and come back roughly once a month to rescan and index your content. But if you update your site or blog frequently the search engines will come back more frequently, so that should be the goal.
Keep in mind that your meta tags are used by the search engine spiders only as a broad guideline as to what your site contains. Your on-page content is what the search spiders are looking at to determine what your site is about. Both factors weigh heavily in how well your website ranks and the individual pages as well, so make sure every page of your site is as “optimized” as possible.
