With the newest updates from Google and other search engine providers, search engine optimization is adapting rapidly to stay edgy and effective. So what is Search Engine Optimization? While SEO is not a perfect science, it is still effective in promoting websites to rank higher in search engine results, thus leading to more traffic and business.
Search Engine Optimization
Place yourself in the shoes of a search engine provider for a moment to put you in a better position to gain an understanding of how to go about search engine optimization. What is their goal? To keep people using their search engine (increase retention) so that advertisement revenue can increase. How do they accomplish that? By constantly providing the most relevant and best search results possible. How do you take advantage of that if you own a website? You can hire someone who has extensive experience with Google and other search engines to think like them, and optimize your website based on the intentions of the search engines and turn up the heat in places where the search engines allow extra opportunity to boost ranking.
Title Tag
The title tag is a crucial factor when search engine’s crawl your website to index it for a phrase. The title tag weighs quite heavily into your ability to rank on a phrase. Whatever you want to rank on should be front and center in your title tag. Extensive research should take place before you choose a title tag. Your tag should include products, important phrases, and other terms that are relevant, but also page-specific (unique to that page).
Description
The description is what a search engine will pull to fill the data underneath the link to your search result. If you do not provide a description the search engine will use whatever it finds at the top of your main site page. The search engine is assuming that you’re going to put your most relevant content on your main index page. The description acts as a specific method of providing description meta data.
Keywords
Barely used at all anymore. In fact, most research suggests that using keyword meta data can do more harm than good because it is the first place that the new algorithyms will check for keyword stuffing and “over optimization” which will definitely hurt your ranking.
Alt Tags
Primarily overlooked by most webmasters, the alt tags in your code are essential to gaining boost on relevance to a given phrase on any given page. It is highly recommended to use this, in tandem with the most current best practices for accessibility features to allow people that are handicapped or using an alternative method of browsing to get the best experience. Again, in the eyes of the search engines this is extra work that shows your commitment to serving your users the best possible experience. It is also very easy for search engines to program website crawlers “spiders” to recognize these features and add points to the weight of your page to reward you for your effort.
Header Tags
This is a no-brainer. The header tags (in copy title tags) of your pages should be relevant to the content. Avoid over-use of these on any given page as they should all be unique to their own pages. Rare exceptions exist, and variations are one of those exceptions that make multiple high level header tags a recommendation.
Analytics
The use of Analytics in conjunction with a tailored strategy for your website is crucial because of the gained ability to measure the effectiveness of the campaign and to allow adjustments for all of the “low hanging fruit” areas that might have been missed.
If you’d like to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, please contact Legendary Lion Web Design.
