In our post, Ready, Assess, Fire, Aim – Laying the Groundwork for Online Marketing we looked at your current online presence: Your Home Base. We asked you to answer the following questions.
- Do you have a website?
- Do you or your organization have full control of the site?
- Do you have access or do you have someone (this could be you, a team, department, consultant or consulting firm, etc.) that can quickly update your website?
- Do you currently track what happens on your site? (i.e. Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.)
In this post, we are assuming that you have a website where you are able to make changes.
Many times we see websites that are beautifully designed, but the designers either neglected SEO completely or they may even be doing things that go against simple best practices. We’re going to look at some basics.
Here are some general things that you need to look at for SEO best practices.
Meta tags: These are snippets that are in your website’s code that tell browsers what to display where and search engines take notice of them. It is surprising how many companies, even marketing agencies, misuse these tags. The following is a list of the most important tags.
- Title Tag: This is what you see along the top of your browser. Many of the new browsers cut this off because of the way they use tabs, but if you hover over the tab you can see the full title. It also shows up as the first line on the search results page.
- You should create an informative title that includes keywords.
- Avoid duplicate page titles, so each page should have a unique title.
- The character limit for the title tag is 70 characters as this is the number of characters shown on the search results page.
- Example: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword |Brand Name
SEO Services – Search Engine Optimization | Blackbird e-Solutions - Example: Brand Name | Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword
Blackbird e-Solutions | SEO Services – Search Engine Optimization
- Meta Description Tag: This is the description of the page that shows up in SERPS and should entice people to click on your link.
- It should be between 150 and 160 characters. Search engines will truncate anything longer and if it is too long you could be docked by the search engines as well.
- Concentrate on one to three keywords in this tag. Many people try to dump as many keywords in as possible, but Google and the company look at this as keyword stuffing.
- Let me stress again it should entice people to click on your link in search results.
- Avoid duplicate descriptions: I.e. each page should have a unique relevant description.
- H1 Tag. This is the main header that you see on the page. It should include your keyword and the main subject of the site. There is no limit on this, but dumping in a bunch of keywords will get you in trouble.
You might notice that I did not mention the Keyword Meta Tag, that’s because it is essentially irrelevant now. Historically people have used this tag to try to game the search engines, so the major engines ignore it. Below is a video from Matt Cutts, Google’s authority on web spam, talking about meta tags.
Now that you know the basic meta tags you should look at, next time we’ll look at some tools to evaluate this and many other parts of your website.
