A Game of Tag – Getting Your SEO Basics Right

SEO is no longer regarded as the “dark art” that many of us believed it to be in the past. Having said that, there are a number of (not so magic) tricks you should perform, that, whilst they may seem like a lot of hassle to those of you that are non-technical , getting the basics right when developing or uplifting your website will provide you with a very good foundation for solid Google rankings.

 

Title Tags – The Jewel in the Crown

Apply the right title tags – these are highly relevant to the page they refer to and therefore highly valuable to optimising your website with search engine visibility. Title tags should be made up of the key words and or phrases that best represent the body, (and the keywords) of the content within a page; for example, valuable and efficient title tags for this page could be:- website page title heading tags SEO

Be aware that Google only recognises a Title Tag of a specific size – too short and the tags you apply to a page title will not achieve full value, (after all, we’re talking about optimisation), too long and you dilute the value of each tag; a decent rule of thumb is to stick to roughly 60 characters (including spaces), or about 6-7 words.

 

Heading Tags – Telling It Like It Is

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Although you may not see the immediate impact of the Heading Title, it is one of the basics required for a solid SEO foundation. Over time as you regularly add fresh, new content Heading Tags should include the actual phrase that the content within the page is about and will help your web visitors to find the content you want found.

 

Description Tags – Keeping It Short And Sweet

These should logically include an excerpt from the content within a particular page and, according to Google, they shouldn’t be more than 80 characters long. For example, a relevant Description Tag for this page would be:- Apply the right title tags – these are highly relevant to the page they refer to… Don’t be tempted to repeat these excerpts within your website as they may have a negative influence on your SEO!

Other Tags that should always appear on your web pages are the Alt Tags that are applied to the images; whilst they have little SEO value, they will help visually impaired people browse your site. If hovering a mouse over an image, audio text readers will describe the image and a text description will also appear while waiting for a slow loading image to appear.

Are you planning a new website and confused by all the tag options?

Does your website need to cater for the visually impaired?