Just like charity, cleanliness begins and ends at home. Err… we’re going off topic you feel? But this philosophy applies to website SEO as well. To attract visitors to your site, make sure your onsite parameters are optimized to allow search engines to crawl easily. To allow for effective onsite optimization, you need to first understand the different parameters that affective onsite optimization. Some important parameters include meta data (meta pages, meta descriptions, and meta tags), images, page URLs and other canonical issues. Lets’ discuss some of these including title tags, meta tags, and image alt tags.
Title Tags:
A title tag is very important to identify and validate a web page. Of course, you say! After all, the HTML specification needs a title tag! But not everyone takes the initiative to ensure that content in the title tag is attractive enough. A title line that describes the essence of the web page, serves as a precursor to the information inside, and every page of your website should include a title.
For instance, for a web page about discounted shoes, a title tag that reads ‘Shoes at discounted rates’, your dreams of high search engine rankings would surely remain one. Search engines place importance to title tags and hence including keywords in the title tag helps to boost search engine rankings. Also, the title should be descriptive enough about the content inside. A web page for discounted Nike shoes, certainly deserves a better title than, ‘Buy discounted shoes at affordable prices’. This is descriptive of the entire website and not specific to that page alone.
And of course, don’t choose silly default titles, like ‘Home Page’, ‘Default Page’ etc. Companies that offer professional SEO services can help you choose the Title Tag content with care.
- Do Check: Title Tag Optimization
Meta Tags:
Meta tags are details that are used to give metadata about the web page. Thus a description about the content is explained and through the meta keywords tag, lists out a set of keywords that the viewer is most likely to key in. If you haven’t done this, I’d suggest don’t bother unless you are someone who would rather not worry about the current trends, but follow your own sense of rational structure.
It was always believed that the Mecca of search engines, Google, did not use meta tags to rank sites. In fact, the latest blog by Matt Cutts makes it official, that ‘Google does not use keywords meta tag’. However, it sometimes uses the meta tag description in the snippets, it is not used in the ranking.
- Do Check: Meta Tag Optimization
Image Alt Tags:
When the cursor hovers around an image, the text that is displayed there is the image alt tag. It is also meant to be used by users who have either disabled images or cannot view the images; to help them understand what the image is all about. Needless to say, the Alt text should be descriptive enough; especially after the confirmation from Google that it focuses on the Alt or Alternative text when it is trying to understand the image.
As earlier said, these are just some of the parameters. You can always speak to a company offering professional SEO services to help with onsite optimization.
The Author is a professional SEO consultant.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
All these meta tags and img tags are important elements to make an article and website rank well in search engines. This is a great article for beginners and a good one as a reminder for all of us.
Meta tags, alt tags, keywords, description are really important for good ranking.
informative article for begginers..
when did you guys change???? looks like a shift for me