Optimizing your website to both rank well in search engines and attract targeted human traffic particularly involves good and relevant content, helpful internal linking for navigation purposes, and inbound links. Meta tags in the source code may also help, although they are not weighted as heavily as they once were. They come between the head tags — <head>in between these</head>.
Title Tags
Titles in title tags come between the beginning and the closing tags (between <title> and </title>). They should be about 63 characters or less so they can be read on search engines. Include keywords related to page. Have title tag for each page, and make each viewer friendly.
Title tags will appear in the upper left of the browser screen when the page is in view. Title tags are probably the most important of the tags listed here, and thought should be given not only to how the title summarizes the page it represents, but give the reader reason to read the page. A too-generic title tag is not in your best interest.
Description Tags
Description tags briefly summarize a given page. The format looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”description in here”>, with the description between the quotation marks as here. Description tags should be less than 160 characters in length (1 to 3 sentences). If your site is indexed, the description may be important for conversions, but probably not for SEO (search engine optimization). The description should be viewer friendly, with a keyword included near beginning.
The content of a description tag may show up as the second (and possibly third) line in organic search results.
Keyword Tags
Keyword tag tag format looks like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords in here”> with the keywords between the quotation marks as here. One or perhaps two keywords are recommended per page. Keyword tags are not overly important; but don’t overdo the keywords by multiplying or spamming them. Use keywords found in the page represented. However, Google does not use keywords in the keyword tag for ranking.
Heading Tags
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
Heading tags (not to be confused with <head> tags above) may make it easier for a robot to crawl your site, sort of like a bold-print outline to a human.
And of course the headers, keywords, descriptions, and titles should be representative of and relevant to the pages they represent.
Lastly, Brad Fallon notes, “SEO is a marathon, not a [quick] race.” It will probably take time for your site to be ranked in the search engines.
P.S. For further information on html basics, see my HTML Basics post or for training in internet marketing, see Niche Profit Classroom for which I am an affiliate.
