Optimizing your web page’s meta tags come with a few additional considerations besides keyword selection. In this blog post, lets discuss some Best Practices for optimizing your meta tags for search engine crawlers.

1). The Title Tag – The Title tag is among the most important factors Search Engine Crawlers look for in SEO. It is meant to define what your page is all about, for both search engine crawlers and users who are searching for your site in either Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Here is an image to see how your title tag appears in the search index.

It is an SEO best practice to keep your title tag to 70 characters long, including spaces.

2). The Description Tag – The Description tag is also an important factor for SEO. The description tag should reinforce the title tag and provide a little more information about the page to both the crawler and the user who is searching for your site. When writing your description tag, make sure to include your chosen keywords for the page and clearly define what the pages are  about. Also be sure your sentences are grammatically correct, as users will be reading the description in their search results, as the example image below will show. 

The SEO best practice length for the description tag is roughly 150-180-characters, including spaces.

3). The Keyword Tag – The Keyword Tag is currently not accounted for by search engines, so stuffing a bunch of words you want to rank for is not going to help. A good practice would be to include the keyword or key phrase you are optimizing the page for, just in the event that one day Google makes a change and starts to again account for the keyword tag in their algorithm.   

Once you have selected your keywords, following these guidelines will ensure you are using Best Practices for optimizing your meta content. There is no need to over-do-it when writing meta content. Simply do your best to optimize each page with a single and unique keyword or phrase. Make sure each page has unique meta tags related to that keyword and you will likely see increases in your rankings.

I sometimes feel as though we’re all so focused on a website being search engine friendly that we easily lose site of the importance of it being user friendly, as well. It can be a difficult balance to cater to both the user and to the search engines (namely Google and Bing ). The perfect scenario is to have a website that is both visually appealing to the user, while simultaneously being SEO friendly. Sounds like it would be an easy thing to accomplish, right? Unfortunately, it’s not. Far too many websites have one and not the other.

So how do you end up with a website that has both? The best way is to start from the ground up. You’ll want to ensure that you have a qualified SEO Engineer working in conjunction with a skilled Web Designer. I have seen many instances where a client hired a snazzy design firm that built a beautiful looking website with bells and whistles galore, only to find that it could not be any less SEO Friendly if it tried. Typically what happens next is the client then has to “backtrack” and do their best of optimizing the site after the fact, since their finished product was not designed with the search engines in mind. In hindsight, it would have been very helpful to have an SEO Agency involved from the beginning and throughout the development of the new site. This approach can also help you save time and money by combining SEO with design rather than tackling afterwards, which can be a frustrating and more expensive way to go.

If you are in the process of a website redesign or designing one from scratch, I strongly encourage you to consider both the user and the search engines from the onset. This will negate any obstacles of the search engines not being able to effectively crawl through your site and/or the end user not having a satisfactory experience. Think about it this way: If your site shows up well organically, but when a user gets there he has trouble with the navigation and can’t find what he wants…then your SEO friendly efforts are, in a sense, a waste. 

All of the websites we design are completely optimized for the search engines, while still taking into account the user’s perspective, as well. If you’d like to peruse some of our previous work, please visit our Design Portfolio Page.

Making up the foundation of search engine optimization are four key concepts on which you should build your SEO strategy.  The four cornerstones are: content, keywords, linking, and architecture.

Content
What is content? Why is it important? Content is all of the words that appear on a page or in the code of your website.  Think about your business and what you wish customers knew about your product, service, location, or team.  Do you have special promotions or certain offerings you would like to feature?  Writing about these different subjects fills your site with content.  Adding new content to your website in a timely manner helps search engine spiders recognize that your site is active.  Additionally, websites can develop an onsite blog as a place for announcements, information, and other pieces of new content that could embellish the website.

Keywords
What is a keyword? What is a keyword phrase? What are long tail keywords?  You may have heard or read about keywords when trying to develop an SEO strategy.  Keywords are words that represent the main topic of each page of your website.  For example, if you have a business like an Italian pizzeria in South Florida, your main keyword will most likely be “pizza.” Since you are not the only (theoretical) pizzeria in the world, you will want to have pages on your site that have more specialized words describing your specific pizzeria.  These combinations of keywords are called keyword phrases.  Keeping with the pizzeria example, three keyword phrases could be “Italian pizza by the slice,” “Theoretical Pizza by Juan Carlo,” and “pizza delivery near University of Miami.” Very granular (and often long) keyword phrases are called long tail.  An example for our pizzeria could be “New York style pizza with garlic bread crust near University of Miami.” Choosing your keywords carefully and monitoring to see which bring in customers can help you grow your online presence and your business.

Linking
Why do you want related sites linking to your webpage? Why is proper internal linking so important? Related sites linking to your webpage (not just your homepage) show search engines that your site is relevant to your industry. A webpage’s ranking potential is partially determined from the quality of relevant sources that link to the website.  When structuring the links of your website, make sure that there are no dead ends.  It frustrates users and search engine spiders alike.  Use proper sitemap syntax.  This will tell the search engines which pages to index, in case they missed any when crawling the rest of the site, and how to prioritize the pages they have found.  Additionally, a large push to increase the number of links coming into your site all at once could have an adverse affect.  Search engines know that it is a slow process and understand that as you add new pages and additional content to your site more people will link to you.

Site Architecture
Do you know how to communicate with the search engine spiders? The robots.txt file contains information of where you would like search engines to visit (such as a link to your sitemap), but also information on where the search engine spiders should not go.  Making sure search engine spiders can find all of your pages that you want indexed and none of the pages you don’t should be a part of your strategy and not left to chance. How your website is designed is also important.  Search engines have a hard time reading Flash along with some other fancy design features.  Users visiting your website may also complain of slow load times and music they can’t figure out how to turn off.  Simple, user-friendly design is often better for SEO. 

Additionally, structuring your site so a majority of your content is contained in images is troublesome for search engines.  Other than the image’s file name and alt tag (if there is one) the search engines see empty space.  Paying careful attention to site architecture when designing your website can save you from a costly redesign down the road.  If you did not have a strategy in place during the formation of your current website, a redesign may improve sales and show a significant return-on-investment.

These four cornerstones make up the foundation of a solid SEO strategy.  They work together to increase the number of indexed pages on a website and to increase the chances those indexed pages will show up in search rankings.  All can be optimized for placement of your website near the top of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Search is vital for all businesses, whether B2C or B2B, big or small, eCommerce or service based.  Any industry can benefit from search engine optimization.  Having a sound SEO strategy in place is increasingly important as more and more consumers rely on search engines.