Top 10 basic SEO tips – Part 1
Introduction
I have read many posts from the internet giving advice on the best search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to improve your website’s ranking and having successfully carried out a number of SEO campaigns for various companies, I thought it’s about time I share some of the things I have learned along the way.
Firstly, let me state that this tutorial is intended for the SEO beginner and the following advice may seem obvious to those with optimisation experience. Saying that, optimisation is constantly evolving so there may still be some useful tidbits even for the experienced SEOs.
This is the first installment of a three-part series. The second and third parts will cover intermediate and advanced SEO techniques so keep watching this space!
So on to the SEO advice… All these tips are considered on-page optimisation which means that they involve making amendments to your website alone in order to improve your position in the search engine result pages (SERPs). They can all be done by yourself and you should notice results relatively quickly.
1. Do your research
This is probably one of the most obvious pieces of advice I can give you yet it can often be the most overlooked. Before you begin any form of optimisation, make sure you know a lot about your chosen industry. Think about what phrases people are likely to type in to find you and then use the Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal) to find out how many people use these search phrases on a monthly basis. There’s no point investing your time and effort optimising a particular search phrase if nobody uses it.
Try to avoid using industry jargon and acronyms when selecting phrases for optimisation. It may be obvious to you what a ‘model 1456D widget’ is but would your visitors know that and more importantly would they know to type this into a search engine? It’s generally better to go for more generic phrases as these are more likely to have higher search volumes. Avoid phrases that are too generic as the competition will most often be very fierce and therefore much more difficult to achieve the results you’d like.
2. Page titles
The page title is arguably the most important factor for SEO as this is where you tell visitors and search engines alike exactly what the page is about. The page title firstly appears right at the top of your internet browser but is also the part that is displayed as the blue link in search engine results.
In HTML, the title of a page is denoted by:
<title>Your page title</title>.
First and foremost, make sure that the title accurately reflects the content of the page (stuffing keywords into the title that have nothing to do with the page content could soon land you in trouble). The main trick to setting effective titles is to think about what the page is about and what good keywords would be relevant. You then make sure that you have your keywords incorporated within the page title.
A common mistake I’ve seen is the inclusion of company names within page titles such as “Web design – vermadesign.co.uk” and “Web Design | Verma Design”. Unless you have a well known brand, it is not advisable to display your company name. People generally won’t search using your company name and so you’re wasting space that could be put to better use such as “Web Design | UK Website Development”.
In terms of the maximum length of page titles, I would recommend you don’t exceed 65 characters for any title. This will ensure your titles are displayed in Google and Yahoo in their entirety and nothing gets truncated.
Ensure all the page titles within your website are different. You should never have two pages that cover the same content and if you do, you should consider combining them. If you have a website that contains thousands of pages, there is a simple way to detect duplicates via Google Webmaster Tools (see 10).
3. Meta description
The meta description is a tag that was originally implemented to allow you to write a brief description of the page content. It almost acts as a blurb or snippet of the page content itself and expands on the page title much like a books.
Meta descriptions are denoted in HTML as:
<meta name="description" content="Description of the page content goes in here..." />
Search engines will often use your description as the black text that appears just under your page title in SERPs (see image above). Your description therefore is another area where you can add relevant keywords to improve your ranking. If you look at the image above, you can see that not only have keywords been bolded in the title, but also the description which shows how the description can helping reinforce your keywords. Search engines do reserve the right to create their own snippet based on the content of your page if they feel it is more suitable for visitors. It’s important that you do not spam the description with keywords as a) it is likely to put off potential visitors. Remember, your description will be displayed in the SERPs b) search engines may disregard you description altogether and use their own generated description if they feel yours is not suitable.
In terms of the maximum length of a Meta Description, I’ve read many people say it’s about 255 characters, however, in my experience I always aim to keep them within 150 characters as search engines tend not to display above and beyond this.
4. Meta keywords
The Meta keywords tag was originally implemented to help webmasters indicate a page’s relevant key phrases to search engines. This was before search engines were capable of accurately determining the key phrases from the content for themselves.
The Meta keywords tag is denoted in HTML as:
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4" />
Although the tag is called keywords, you are not limited to single words only and in fact you can string together long phrases as long as you separate each grouping by a comma. So an example could be:
<meta name="keywords" content="optimisation, seo, search engine optimisation" />
You can have any number of keywords and not just limited to single words, you can also add phrases as long as they are separated by a comma. Ensure you keep the total length of your keywords within 256 character (including spaces) and try to avoid duplicating the same word again and again. An example of overuse of a keyword could be:
“cars, cheap cars, affordable cars, white cars, black cars, grey cars, big cars, small cars, fast cars, shiny cars, loud cars, vintage cars, muscle cars”
The above example contains the keyword ‘cars’ a total of 13 times in 25 words. This is considered an overkill and you should aim to use a single word no more than 6 times in the entire keyword tag. There is nothing stopping you varying the phrases such as using ‘autos’, ‘vehicles’ or ‘automobiles’ instead.
Google no longer relies on meta keywords to determine key phrases due to the high level of abuse from spammers. Instead, Google determines the keywords via the inbound links and page content. Other search engines like Yahoo and Bing have shown signs of still using meta keywords in their algoritms although not nearly as much as originally intended. Never-the-less, for this reason, meta keywords can still be quite a benefit.
5. Headings
Headings help separate your content to make it easier to read and can be very useful in SEO as search engines place an emphasis on headings. This is because headings provide a description of the ensuing content within a short summary. This means that they are usually rich with keywords which search engines can make use of. Headings label your headline so that search engines will recognise it as “important” on your web page. The heading tags also make your headline bolder so it will stand out to your readers.
The Meta keywords tag is denoted in HTML as:
<h1>Top 10 basic SEO tips</h1> <h2>5. headings</h2>
There are a variety of heading tags you can use such as (h1,h2,h3). The importance of the heading is denoted by the number with 1 being the top-level. Effectively, h1 is a sub-heading of the main page content, h2 is a sub-heading of h1 and h3 is a sub-heading of h2.
You should try to incorporate you key phrases within your headings so to place an emphasis on what the page is about. Ensure the headings are relevant to the content and that you don’t just stuff keywords in there. Remember, what you write should be for a human to read, not a search engine.
Aim to use more specific key phrases in your headings as you’re less likely to yield good results with generic ones due to the number of other websites that will be using the same headings as you.
If you have a lot of content on a page, you should try to separate you content into manageable chunks using headings. Use the sub-headings to tell your readers what the page is about and entice them in to read on.
You should only have one headline on a page which is the top of your page hierarchy, for this reason, you should only use one h1 tag per page. Having multiple h1 tags and encapsulating the entire page content within a h1 tag is discouraged and in some extreme cases can even lead to a search engine penalty.
Make sure your h1 tag contains your relevant keywords and if you have a lo of key words/phrases, spread them between the page title and h1 tag. There is no harm in having the same h1 tag as the page title but you can target more phrases if you ensure they differ.
While search engines are reputed to put some weight on a heading between h3 tags, you should focus more on h1 and h2 tags as these will give the greatest benefit.
Read part 2 of our Top 10 basic SEO tips