This the first article in a small series covering what you need to know to optimize your website to be search engine friendly.
Why is SEO important?
Many sites rely on search engines for the majority, possibly even all, of their websites traffic. So basically, the better you optimize your website the better you’ll be ranked in search engines. The better you are ranked in search engines the more traffic you’ll get. Starting to see the picture?
There are many parts to SEO. What we’ll look at in this article is the HTML markup that makes up your website. You may not know that the HTML that you write has a big impact on the outcome of your ranking. So what’s the secret to good SEO markup? Well, it isn’t a secret at all. Search engines rank markup based on semantics. These semantics or standards are layouted out by the W3C. Each markup tag is given a specific purpose and search engines expect each tag to be used the way it was intended. Meaning, if a search engine finds a <p> paragraph tag it assumes it is filled with a paragraph of your content.
Let’s take a look at some important tags and the best ways to use them.
Title tag (<title>)
This is an important tag because it is the first piece you relavent content the search engine will see when it is crawling your site. It is also usually the title of the search result that gets returned for you page.
Many websites make the mistake of not taking advantage of this tag and only place their company name, for example, in it. There is much more you can do.
Let’s use a fictional moving company called Mac’s Movers. Let’s look at a good use of the title tag for this company.
<title>Reliable and affordable movers in the New York area - Mac's Movers - The friendly movers.</title>See how the first part of the title wasn’t the company name or even the company slogan? The first part of the title should always be something that contains your keywords or phrases. We’ll take about keywords in a later article.
Meta tags
Meta tags like keywords and description aren’t as important as they once were. Due to keyword spam and keyword stuffing search engines usually ignore these tags. Even though they may not be important to your overall rank they still play a key part in getting the user to click your link in the search results.
Search engines will use your page’s description as the result description if it is available. This means you can customize what the user sees when your page appears in search results. This is very important because you can display content that will intise the user to click your link. If the description tag is not present on your page the search engine will display the first chunk of text it finds on your page, even if it is your navigation links. Not good! Be sure to always include meta description tags on all your pages.
Heading tags
Heading tags define the different sections of the page. There are 6 different heading tags (<h1>…<h6>), <h1> being the most important (defining the overall topic of the page). As a general rule all section titles should use heading tags. You can use any combination of heading tags (1-6) but you should limiteach page to just one <h1> tag as some search engines consider using more than one to be spamming.
Example:
<h1>How to train your dog</h1>
<p>This article is how to train your dog....</p>
<h2>Different commands</h2>
<p>Paragraph about different training commands...</p>
<h2>How to reward your dog</h2>
<p>How to reward your dog when they learn something...</p>The above example shows that the main topic of the page is training your dog while the H2 headings break the page into different related sections.
Some final thoughts
I have explained the most important parts of writing your HTML with SEO in mind. Here are a few more thoughts I will leave you with:
Use paragraph tags <p>. This should be pretty self explainitory. Use paragraphy tags to break up you content instead of break <br> tags.
Avoid using tables as much as possible. If possible use CSS to layout your pages. This will allow you to markup the content in the order you want the search engine to read it while still being able to present it to the user in the way you want.
With this article you should have the understanding of how to get started doing basic SEO for your self.
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