Keywords
Keywords are one of the most crucial parts of your SEO Campaign. Choose the wrong ones, and your efforts will essentially be wasted. Choose the correct keywords however and your traffic can increase significantly.
It is worth thinking about the keywords you are going to use for a long time, and even researching them before deciding on it. You should begin by making a list of keywords your website targets and then go through and cross out the least relevant until you are left with a dozen or so. From those, make a list of short phrases that your users are most likely to search for when looking for your website or product.
When you have your phrases, get rid of the phrases that are least likely to be searched for until you have four to six remaining. Those are your keywords.
A search engine optimisation company will go into a lot more depth when choosing keywords and will thoroughly dissect your market. But for DIY SEO, this is a great way to start.
Title Tags
The title tag is perhaps one of the most important factors of your SEO efforts. The importance of keywords inside the title tag is huge as this is the text people will see when they search for your website in a search engine. Their decision to click through to your website could be decided by what appears in this text.
A title tag looks like this:
It belongs inside the and tag on each page in your website. Omitting it can cause validation errors.
There are limits to the size of the title tag that will be read by the search engines. In many cases, no more than 80 characters is read or displayed by the search engine, so your most important keywords should go in the first 80 characters.
Be careful not to just list your keywords in the title tag. Make it grab the attention of your visitors as being the number one result in a search engine listing means nothing if you get no clicks through to your website.
Most important of all, make sure each title tag on your website is unique with its own keywords.
Optimise
There are lots of ways to optimise your Meta tags, but before you do this, you should be sure your Meta tags are being put into the correct place in the web page code and that you’re using them correctly.
All Meta tags should go inside the and tags in the source. There are lots of different types of Meta tags, but we’re only focusing on a select few; title, description and keywords.
Description Tag Tips:
Describe the page your visitors will be going onto in as much depth as possible in less than 160 characters. This gives the best chance of the user clicking through to the page if its contents interest them.
Always try to include a few keywords in your description, especially if you use them in your title tag or page contents. This will make the page easier to search for based on its description.
Keep important keywords closer to the beginning of the description. If you don’t do this, you might find that the search engine cuts off your description if they limit the length, meaning your important keywords are never seen.
Keyword Tag Tips:
The keywords tag is used by search engines to know your targeted keywords. However, you can’t use the keywords tag on its own, as it has to be accompanied by the title tag, description and content. If they don’t match up, your rankings won’t increase.
Don’t forget to use plurals, as plurals are different search terms to singulars in search engines. And sometimes a common misspelling can be used if your website or product names are difficult to spell. Use this one with caution, however. Try not to repeat single words in your keywords tag more than a few times.
If you are targeting a specific area or location, include the name of the place you are targeting in the keywords too.
