SEO Tips
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 28, 2009
You may be wondering if the Description Meta Tag helps with SEO. Well, the answer to that question depends. What is your definition of SEO? Is it just increasing your site’s search engine ranking; or is it increasing your site’s search rankings, visitors, quality of visitors, and conversions? Well if you answered the latter – as you should have – then the answer is yes it does help with search engine optimization!
While having keyword rich descriptions may help with your search engine ranking on some of the smaller search engines, I wouldn’t expect any visible keyword-ranking increase on the larger ones.
However, that doesn’t mean there’s little value in optimizing your meta description tag. Here are a few great reasons to have a good description:
- Telling searchers what the web page is about
- Increase click-through rate
- Increase conversion rate
The description meta tag is found in the head section when viewing the HTML code of your web page, and it can be edited there. However, the most common place it is viewed by humans is on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) right below the title of your page, and this is what you should optimize it for. Here is SEO Rankings on Google’s SERP:
(I just realized I don’t like my description very much and changed it as I wrote this post. 
)
Generally, a good description is written in full sentences, describes what the page is about, and contains variants of the keywords the page is optimized for. The description should be different on each web page. If you can’t update the description on every page, then in some cases it may be better using no description at all, rather than the same description on multiple pages.
If Google doesn’t think your meta description tag if relevant to what the searcher is searching for, but your web page is, they will usually grab a snippet of text from somewhere else on your page and display it on their SERP. While, this is helpful, it’s not nearly as good as having searchers see your personalized attention grabbing meta description.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 24, 2009
The title tag is VERY important for SEO; perhaps the most significant on-page search engine ranking factor.
Just check out this recent survey taken by 72 top SEO experts. According to my experience, and this survey, using keywords in your title tag holds the most significant weight when determining a page’s search engine ranking. Almost as significant – where you place keywords in the tag.
So, as you can see, once you’ve determined which keywords to target, the title tag should be the first place to start optimizing for those keywords. I’ll go into optimizing your title tag shortly.
Where is the title tag found?
Typically, the title tag is one of the first tags found in your page’s source code; it is located in the head section, and will look similar to this:
The title tag is also one of the first tags read by the search engine spiders as they crawl your website. It is used to identify what the page is about, similar to the title of a book.
When a user views your website they will find the page’s title at the very top left-hand corner of your web browser and on the browser tabs. Also, when a user searches for your product or services they will see your page’s title on the search engine results page (SERP), and that will link them directly to the related page on your website.
Google only shows the first 70 characters of the page’s title on the SERP; and I don’t recommend using more than 70 characters in your page’s title either.
How to optimize your title tag
There are 4 important criteria you should consider when optimizing your title tag:
Keyword Prominence – measure of keyword importance indicating how close a keyword is to the beginning of the title.
Keyword Density – measure of the percentage of keywords to the general number of words in the title.
Keyword Frequency – number of times your keyword is used in the title.
Keyword Proximity – how close keywords that make up a key phrase are to each other.
While it is important to understand the four main criteria – in my opinion – and according to the above noted survey; the most significant criteria to focus on is prominence, i.e., how close your keyword is to the beginning of the title. A good rule of thumb is to always put your keyword at the very beginning. If you remember to do this on every page, then you will have already done most, if not all, your necessary title-tag search engine optimization.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on July 31, 2009
There are many companies out there who claim they will get you top rankings by submitting your web site to thousands of directories and search engines for little to nothing. While that may help a little, the impact will be minor, and you’ll likely be very disappointed with the results. Here is a list of 5 major components that should be addressed if you want to increase your organic search engine ranking and drive targeted traffic to your website from the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
1. Keywords
2. HTML Tags / Code
3. Site Structure / Page Layout
4. Content
5. Website Popularity
1) Keywords
A very important part of this focus area is keyword selection and where you place those keywords on your web pages. In order for your target audience to find your web site on the search engines, your web pages must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases your target audience is typing into search query forms. You can do this using a keyword research tool. One free tool is Google’s keyword research tool. While it is important to focus your content around specific key phrases, it is equally important that you provide unique, valuable content.
Once you have your keywords, it’s now time to start optimizing your pages. Be sure to use your keywords wherever reasonably possible in each of the following components.
2) HTML Tags / Code
- Tags (title, description, h1)
- Attributes (alt, title)
3) Site Structure / Page Layout
- URLs
- Internal linking
- Headings
4) Content
- Be sure to add unique, valuable content to your website, and update it frequently. If frequently updating your website doesn’t make sense for your business, be sure to add a handful of helpful content related to your industry.
5) Website Popularity
- Get Quality Inbound Links
This is just a brief summary of the components to address when optimizing a website. I could never hope to cover every aspect of SEO in one blog post, but if you start with the components outlined here, you will be off to a great start!
Note: I’ll be providing optimization tips for individual components in subsequent blog posts.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on April 15, 2009
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website or web page to receive high-quality targeted traffic from search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo! Search. Typically, the better your site is optimized, the higher “rankings” it will receive in the respective search engines - theoretically increasing the number of visitors to your website.
The most commonly targeted search results by the search engine optimizers are often referred to “organic” or “natural” search results and rankings. These natural results are most often found just below the sponsored results on a given search engine query result page.
Although natural search results are the most commonly targeted by search engine optimizers, it is important you consider the different kinds of search including: image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines when developing an SEO strategy.
Although SEO as a whole can become very complex – especially for sites in very competitive markets; in general, SEO can be summarized as the modification of your web site’s source code, content, and structure to improve your search engine ranking.
