Well here it is my first blog post! Because Search Engine Optimization is such a big thing right now it will be the subject of my first post. I’m just going to cover the basics here; however, I don’t mind going into a more in depth discussion & I’m sure I will as the post grows. Enjoy!
There are many things you can do to help improve your search engine listings. Here at InteractOne we call these best practices and they are included in our base SEO package. For every web page there is a set of Meta tags. These tags are sometimes seen by human viewers in the search results page for search engines (title tag, description meta); however, they are more importantly used by search engines to evaluate and classify your website. There has been allot of talk around the blogosphere about the relevance of these tags. Whatever you read remember that although the importance of these tags has diminished the last couple of years in no way are they irrelevant. Simple proof is going to major websites and viewing there source code (control U in Firefox, View then source in Explorer); sure enough there they are. The most basic layout is:
- Title
- Description
- Keywords
When explaining this to people the next question I often get is “what do I put in these tags to maximize my SEO?” Although it may seem like an easy answer it is a bit more complicated than you think. First there are character limitations. Put to many words in and you look a spammer, too few and you’re undercutting yourself. My personal rule is under 70 characters for the title tag (including spaces), Under 150 characters for the description tag (including spaces), and only 5-10 keywords describing my business in the keyword tag.
Basis Rules for the Title Tag
-The first words carry the most “weight” so put what your business does there
-Make sure it is legible and enticing to human eyes (this tag show up in the search results)
-If you want to include your business name put it at the end
Basis Rules for Description tag
-again the beginning words carry the most weight
-This may or may not be included in search engine results so keep it nice for human eyes
-put a call to action at the end
Basic Rules for Keywords tag
-First words carry the most weight
-make sure these are the most basic words describing your business
-don’t waste too much time on these
If you follow these simple steps you are on your way to getting a good listing on any of the major search engines!
Cheers for this post. Running a profitable website isn’t as easy as some may think as there is so much involved in it – mainly SEO and other internet marketing. These are part of being a successful site owner because if you can optimize your websites to a good standard and advertise it on the internet in other ways, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make a decent living from it.