Webmaster Articles > Quick SEO for Newbies
Title Tag
The Title tag is where most webmasters make serious mistakes (in case you
didn’t know, the Title tag contains the text that you see on the top
of your browser window). Now the best way to write a Title tag is to make
sure that you get your best keywords for that page in there. Don’t
bother with words that are not needed, such as “and” or “the”
– stick with your core keywords.
Using the example of a website owned by a professional resume writer looking to start their online business, for the home page you would probably use the following Title tag:
“Professional Resume Writer | Guaranteed Resume Writing”
Not only do you have your core keywords in there, you have also managed to combine them in one line without using the needless words like “and” and “the”.
Of course, you can always go too far and stuff the Title tag with as many keywords as possible. If you are thinking about doing that, DON’T! That sort of optimization will land you into trouble with the search engine algorithms, which automatically flag any website that uses spammy optimization techniques – and once you are “red-flagged” like this, you’ll be going down, not up in the rankings.
The next step is to take care of all your header tags.
Header Tags
Also known as H1 and H2 (and so on) tags, the header tags in your page give
the search engine spiders an idea of how your page is structured. Therefore,
if you can put in important keywords that are relevant to your page’s
content in the header tags, the search engine will then “know”
that this particular page contains information on topics relating to those
keywords – thus helping your page rank better for those keywords.
It’s actually simpler than it sounds. Sticking with the “Resume Writer” website, let’s suppose you have a page that’s titled “How to write a Resume” (bear with me here). Now, you might have two sections on that page – an article on resume writing and general resume writing tips. Now instead of lumping it all together, here’s what you could do:
H1 tag for the page heading – including a variation of the Title
tag
H2 tags for both sections – “Resume Writing” and “Resume
Writing Tips” in this case.
Textual Tags
When a search engine spider is scanning a page, it’s looking for several factors to determine what is important and what’s not. In particular, it looks for text tags – bold, underline or italics, to help it rank the page. Why?
Quite simply, the search engine spider is programmed to “think” that any text that is put in bold, italics or underlined is considered important information by the user, and therefore it “might” be important. This is where bullet points come in handy as well.
I said “might” be important because search engine spiders have very sophisticated algorithms that look at hundreds of other factors, including the relevance of the surrounding text.
So if you concentrate on putting bold or italics tags around your core keywords (while maintaining a natural flow of content), you will be directly improving the chances of a search engine spider ranking that page higher for those keywords.
Similarly, if you have an important list of points that you want to emphasize (or perhaps summarize), you could put them in an ordered (numbered) list or just a plain bulleted list on your page – this will set that portion of text apart and alert the search engine spider that this text is more important.
The Image Tag
This is an interesting tag because it’s not that widely-used, and
when some webmasters do use it they tend to stuff the tag with keywords
in a futile attempt to influence search engines.
The Image tag is supposed to help the search engines “read”
into what the image that you are displaying is about – thus the need
to plug in your relevant keywords into the tag. Note that if your image
is, let’s say, a picture of a hiking resort and your website is an
adventure tours business, then you might plug in keywords that relate to
hiking resorts – remember to focus on the core keywords for that page
and not just the website on the whole.
Brad Callen is a SEO Professional and owner of http://www.seoelite.com. He is also an Internet Marketing
Consultant for http://www.Textlinkbrokers.com.
