Core SEO – The Basics (Steps 1 -3)
March 25th, 2009 by Dan
Before we begin getting into advanced SEO there are certain basics that all pages on your site must adhere to, in this article I will attempt to de-mystify the SEO techniques that most pro’s don’t want you to know.
Before We Start
Even before we start looking at our pages we need to have an understanding of how a search engine spider works, and indeed what it is. The search engine spider is a piece of software / code that processes a list of web page url’s according to a set of pre-programmed rules and procedures. Contrary to popular belief these spiders are not intelligent, they do not make decisions, they are robots, they carry out a set of pre-programmed operations to determine how a website should rank.
Step 1 – Keyword Research
Deciding which keywords to target for each page of your site can be a make or break decision for your business. After all, if you get position one for [Keyword A] and the traffic that goes with this, but the highest converting traffic is on [Keyword B] that you didn’t target, you may have wasted time, money and effort on focusing the wrong terms.
If you have a PPC (Pay Per Click) Campaign, then the data from that is invaluable here.
Step 2 – Title Tags
Once you have decided on your keywords, the next step is to look at the <head> section of your page, and firstly the <title> tag. The title tags on each and every page in your site should be entirely unique, they should describe the page, as well as contain the core keywords that you are targeting for that page. The title tag should be no longer than 70 Characters including spaces, as Search Engines such as Google do not read beyond this.
Step 3 – Meta Tags
After the <title> tag, the next piece of information that should be in the head section of your pages are the keywords and description tags, laid out as follows:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”comma, separated, keywords, or, key phrases” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Description will appear under the title in the search results, so sell your page, product or business here.” />
The keywords tell the search engine spiders what they should expect the site to be all about. Although described as keywords these can also be multi-worded key phrases, but they must always be comma separated.
The description will appear below your page title in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page’s), and will be what a user reads when deciding whether to visit your site or not.
Conclusion
This concludes part one of ‘Core SEO – The Basics’, in part two we will look at the rest of your web page outside of the <head> tag.
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