SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of optimizing the content on your website to ensure a high placement on Google search results and an efficient experience for your users to find the content on your site that they’re looking for. SEO professionals, like the staff at Blue 42, look at dozens of potential issues that can impact SEO rankings and user experience but if you’re looking to cover the basics of SEO for your website there’s three main components you need to consider. Those components of your site include page titles, descriptions, and content. In this article we’ll cover the basics of ensuring your site has the information you need to be a contender on the search engine market.
Page Titles - Getting The Point Across
Page titles are very important for SEO. This is the text that appears in the big blue text on the Google results page. It acts as the main link to your content and describes in just a few words what users can expect by visiting your page. This should be the fly-by overview of your page. For example, if the page on your site is about Tax Preparation, your title should read “Tax Preparation | Your Company Name”. This format ensures users can understand whose site they're visiting, and the topic they can expect to be covered on that page. Google only allows a certain amount of space to be used for this line, so be sure to keep your title between 10-60 characters. This will prevent Google from cutting your title off, and potentially leaving your users in the dark about what to expect on your page. Ensuring your title is accurate will help users find what they’re looking for, reducing the number of bounces off your site (users visiting and leaving the page after a few seconds) which will help your search engine ranking.
Descriptions - Getting Into The Details
If the page title is the blue header link on your Google result, the description is the paragraph below it further describing your page in just a couple sentences. This section affords you more word space to entice users to visit your page by detailing more specifically what they can expect. If your description is missing from your page, users will only have your 60 character title to base their decision on what website page to visit. Missing descriptions result in a lower traffic value and increase the bounce rate off your site, ultimately leading to a lower search engine ranking. It is good practice to reiterate verbiage that exists on the page in your description. Google will scan both your description and page content to develop your keywords, so having consistency in language between the two will result in higher keyword ranking. This space, similar to the page title, has a character limit. You’ll want to keep your description below 300 characters to ensure Google doesn’t hide the end of your description.
Page Content - Content Is King
Only a few years ago a key strategy in SEO practice is packing your list of keywords on your site to include as much as possible, hoping to lead to a higher ranking in more keywords. This lead to many site owners packing irrelevant information into their site data in the hopes of ranking for the most keywords.
To prevent this abuse, Google stopped reading keyword data in placing its results hierarchy and instead went towards scanning actual site content for keywords. This means that the written content on your site needs to be as specific to your field and industry as possible to increase your chance that you rank for your relevant keywords. This also means you want to keep any irrelevant information away from your site, or use a more advanced SEO tactic and hide the content with a no-index tag. While not considered relevant to Google placement anymore, creating a list of keywords can be essential when crafting the language of your site so that you can remain focused on the words you would like to rank for.
Conclusion – Just the Beginning
SEO is an almost endlessly deep field that acts as more of an art than science. Troubleshooting a poor placement in Google requires compiling error reports, investigating issues, and experimenting with different solutions to solve your problem. It can involve looking into dead links on your site, reducing duplicate content, and double checking that you have enough internal links on your site. Yet, if you follow these basic steps you’ll be most of the way towards ensuring that your users find your site, and most importantly, find the information they’re looking for.. When it is time to get thicker in the weeds of SEO on your site, contact the friendly professionals at Blue42 to get started!
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