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 If you”re new to SEO and want to get your website seen by search engines, the basics are enough for a cursory ranking, and sometimes you won”t need anything else. For example, if your keywords don”t have a lot of competition, simply optimizing your content might be enough to get you up to the first or second page of Google. However, if you”re struggling to get your ranking up, or if you just want to ensure that your on-site SEO is as tight as possible, here are a few advanced techniques to practice.
Title and Meta Tags
Adjusting these tags requires a very slight knowledge of HTML, but it”s easy enough to pick up. If you go into the HTML of your site, we”re looking for the <title> and <meta> tags. Hitting CTRL F and then typing those into the search field will bring them up. They”ll be close to the top of the page.
Title Tag
The <title> tag is what is displayed as the main title of a web page when it pops up in the search results. If you”re doing a search, you”ll instinctively look at that first to see what the page is about. By default, most pages will display the main title of the page. This is usually enough, but if you”re the type of person who likes to write more “artistic” titles, it might not serve you well. Let”s look at an example of when you might use this:
You have a post on your site”s blog about proper SEO strategy, with the title “Working Out the Kinks In Your Home Page.” It”s interesting, but it doesn”t convey a lot of information about what the post is actually about. Instead of changing the title itself, you can change the <title> tag to something more concise, maybe “SEO Guide for Optimizing a Home Page.” Ideally, this would have your main keyword in it.
Meta Tag
The <meta> tag fulfills a similar purpose, but it gives a short sentence or two summarizing the page. In search results, this is the little blurb below the title and link. If this tag is blank, the search engines will do their best to pull up the most relevant section of the content. You can control what appears, however, by writing it in yourself in the <meta> tag. Again, use your main keyword here (just once) to get the most out of it.
Additionally, you have another option with your <meta> tags. The first is the “Description,” which is what we just talked about, and the second is the “keywords,” which, unlike the description, won”t be visible in the results. The two can be differentiated like this:
<meta name=”"Description”"
<meta name=”"Keywords”"
When putting in the keywords; do it in list form with a comma between each keyword. Try to keep it to fewer than 7 per page.
It”s important to note that after some of the recent Google updates in 2011, Meta tags don”t carry as much weight with ranking. They”re still important however, so don”t completely ignore them.
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