By: Mae Demdam
It’s always helpful when people can share tips and tricks of their trade with others and because of our SEO experience we want to be one of those helpful individuals. There are a lot of different factors to take into consideration when it comes to optimizing your website. Many of which happen during the pre-optimization stage, through research and planning. In our opinion this is the most laborious phase because of the time it takes to ensure you are targeting and using the right keywords and phrases within your web content and meta tags.

AN OVERVIEW OF EACH OF THESE SEO ELEMENTS

Title Tag:

The title tag of any webpage appears at the top of the browser you are using and is often the title when content is shared through social media or republished.

Even with changes that Google has made, having an appropriate title tag in place is still an important factor of search engine optimization. Be sure to follow the suggested character length of 65-70 characters. Anything longer than that will result in ellipsis “…” which leaves your message unfinished. Place target keywords as close to the front of the title tag as possible. This aids in ranking and is more visible for a user when displayed up front. Make use of your brand and business by adding your name within the title tag when possible, keeping in mind keywords and character count. Lastly, consider your message. Make sure your sentence makes sense and has a positive message whether informative or marketing driven.

Meta Description:

This tag exists as a short description of a web page’s content which is the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath the listing (title tag) of search engine results. The meta description is an important aspect of SEO as it functions to some extent as ad copy, but as with title tags there are guidelines and best practices to follow.

Meta descriptions should be no longer than 160 characters, contain marketing copy, and use target keywords within the text which can draw a higher click-through rate from searchers. If you do not add a meta description, search engines will automatically create a snippet using content from the web page, typically the first copy on the page, which may result in ellipsis or a description that doesn’t do the web content justice.

How the Title Tag and Meta Description Appear in Search Results:

Meta Tags:

These tags are used to tell robots or crawling spiders not to index certain content of a web page and/or not scan it for links to follow. We’ve included the common meta tags provided by SEO Gurus at Moz.

• index/noindex -“noindex”, the page will be excluded from the engines.
• follow/nofollow- “nofollow,” the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes.
• noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page’s title and URL in the search results.

Now that you’ve been informed on some of the basic elements of SEO, where can we provide help? By providing you with a FREE Downloadable SEO Organization Chart found here! Our chart can help you organize your SEO Strategy. It has clearly labeled categories where you can input Target Keywords/Phrases, Page Titles, New URLs and Old URL (useful for redirects), SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions (with built in character counter) and much more. This is a streamlined Excel Sheet where your strategy and research can live in a clean and organized format. For even more SEO assistance contact our team