SEO Best Practices for Beginners, Part Two
This is the second of Redengine's two-part primer on Search
Engine Optimization (or "SEO"). In the first part, we walked
through the basics of what SEO was, how search engines work and why
SEO is important. Keywords should be selected with consideration
aided by research and an understanding of your target audience and
how they are likely to search for your content.
In the second half of our guide we're going to talk about some
strategies and best practices you can use to optimize your site for
search and get you started thinking about the specifics of search
engine optimization.
Keyword Rich URLs
URLs are the very first pieces of information a search engines
sees about your site and one of the most important. The value of an
optimized, keyword-rich URL structure cannot be
overemphasized.
Let's take a hypothetical Redengine URL as an example:
http:
//www.redengine.com/learning/SEO/resources/seo-guide.html
This is a decent start. We've got the words "learning," "SEO,"
"resources" and "seo guide" in there, and those are all great
keywords. But there's no downside to lower-level pages having long
URLs, so there's plenty of room to optimize this further. A great
method is to use full titles at each level of navigation.
The path to get to this hypothetical page might be:
Home > Educational Information > SEO >
SEO Resources > Beginner's Guide to SEO Best
Practices
So a more optimized URL might look like:
http:
//www.redengine.com/educational-information/search-engine-optimization/seo-resources/beginners-guide-to-seo-best-practices.html
A longer URL allows for stronger, more varied keyword strings:
in this case "seo" and "search engine optimization" - both equally
as valuable - are present in the URL.
Many content management systems like Umbraco can build these kinds
of smart URLs automatically based on page titles and navigational
structures, making them easy to modify and update.
Optimizing Title Tags
Strong title tags - especially ones that are consistent with
URLs - are a staple of every SEO strategy.
Page titles aren't just important because search engines like
them, though: titles are also important because they actually
appear in the search results. SEO isn't just about getting a high
ranking - it's also about getting users to click through from the
ranking to your website. Well constructed, keyword-rich title tags
serve both strategies.
Best practice tells us page titles should be 90 characters or
less, with the most important keywords appearing in the first half
of the title: search engines will only index the first 90
characters and will display in search results only the first 50 to
60 characters. The best strategy is to include both general and
specific keywords if possible.
Below are two examples of optimized Redengine titles that are
short and contain both general and specific keywords:
1. Redengine: Resources: Beginner's Guide to
SEO Best Practices
2. Redengine: Search Engine Optimization: Guide to SEO Best
Practices
Both titles contain general keywords (our company name) and
specific keywords ("SEO," "Search Engine Optimization," "Resources"
and "SEO Best Practices") relevant to the particular content of a
single page.
Search Friendly Header Tags
Header tags are commonly used html markup tags typically used to
emphasize titles, sections and subsections on a webpage, and most
search engines love to spider these tags. The idea being that, if
the words inside these tags are worth emphasizing visually, they
must be important and integral to the content of the page. Keywords
appearing in header tags are seen as more important - so pay
careful attention to the keywords and content inside these tags
when writing and formatting your web pages.
The first three levels of header tags are most important to search
engines: use < h1 > tags for page titles, < h2 > tags
for page sections, and < h3 > for subsections.
Optimizing Images and Downloadable Files for Search
Search engines don't read websites the same way we do. Where we
see a mix of carefully laid out, visually pleasing columns with a
mix of images and text, search spiders see only the markup code
used to create these layouts. Search engines don't "see" images or
PDFs; they can only read file names and the html code that inserts
those files into your screen.
There are a few tricks we can use to help search engines better
understand the content and context of these files, however:
- Use descriptive keywords when naming your image and PDF files.
Instead of "guide04.01.10.pdf" use
"beginners-guide-to-seo-best-practices.pdf".
- Use image and link title tags to provide brief (20 words or
less) summaries or descriptions of the content. If the item is a
link to a downloadable PDF, the user will see the content of this
title tag when they hover over the link.
- Always enter a brief description of the image in an alt tag.
Visitors won't typically see this information (it will only display
if the image is broken or won't load) but search spiders always
will and count on alt tags to provide helpful context.
If your site contains a lot of downloadable resources or
content, try adding short summaries of each as well as a link for
download. Search engines will love the context-rich words and users
will appreciate the extra information.
Meta Descriptions
Search engines don't give too much weight to the words they find
in meta description tags, so at first glance, populating this
information may seem like a waste of time. But meta descriptions
tags should not be overlooked or swept under the rug. Some search
engines, in addition to the title of your page, may also display
the content in the meta description to users in search results. If
displayed, a well-constructed meta description can improve your
click through rate; remember that being the highest ranking result
for a particular keyword won't help your cause any if no one clicks
on your link!
An example of a strong meta description for this page might
be:
Redengine's quick SEO tips and beginner's guide
to search engine optimization best practices.
A good rule of thumb to follow is to keep meta descriptions to
between 100 and 150 characters long.
Meta Keywords
Once upon a time, meta keywords were the champions of SEO but
black hat abuse has caused page meta data to fall out of vogue with
search engines. There is still value in peppering this field with
keywords regardless - especially if they're consistent with
keywords appearing in your URLs, titles and header tags.
Meta keywords is also a great place to put common misspellings or
alternate spellings of your chosen keywords that people might
search for, such as "color" and "colour."
These SEO best practices are meant to get you started and, in
some ways, is just the tip of potentially huge iceberg: you never
know how big it is until you get under the water. You can dive
deeper into SEO and keyword-reviews by examining all the content of
the page. Words used to link to other pages on your site should be
taken into consideration and reformatting sections of content to
make use of bulleted and numerically-ordered lists can improve both
the searchability and ranking of the page. Sometimes the length of
your content can make a difference, as can keyword density. Search
engine optimization is an ongoing process that, when implemented
effectively, can add tremendous value to your website marketing
strategy.