Basic SEO Part 2 – The Top Of Your Page
Wow. What a busy month so far. Hardly had any time to do anything outside of my normal work and what not.
So, let’s continue with Part 2 of basic SEO. The top of your HTML is some of the most important ‘code’ you are likely to write if you are interested in obtaining a good search engine position. I’m going to break down the four most important factors and hopefully describe it in a way that helps.
1. Title Meta Tag
The title tag is displayed as the headline in Search Engine Result Pages. This title tag should be easy to read and contain your main keyword phrase toward the beginning of the tag. Don’t put your company name first, unless you are huge company already like Amazon or Ebay. People are more likely to search for products or services on offer, not your name. I think it is a good idea to capitalise every word in your tag as well. Titles should be five to ten words long, no more than 70 to 80 characters.
2. Description Meta Tag
The description tag is the paragraph will be displayed in the Search Engine Result Pages. Your description tag should be designed designed to attract customers and it should compel the reader to act right now and follow your link. If you do not include this description tag, search engines will sometimes display the first text on your page (which may not be the best option). When writing your description, you should approach it as though it is a proper sentence and follow proper grammar and the use of punctuation. It is also a good idea to try to include your subject and geographical references to where you are, like your city name. The description should not exceed 150-200 characters in length.
3. Keywords Meta Tag
The importance of Meta keyword tags fluctuates among different search engines. Some people deeply involved with the SEO community debate as to whether or not they help at all. I advise using relevant targeted keywords as they do seem to help with rankings, especially in Yahoo. Avoid stuffing with too many keywords. Just use relevant tags that apply directly to the content of that particular page, and don’t overdo it. Remember this simple ‘rule’: if your total keywords on a page has a value of 100, each keyword you use takes a percentage of that score. So, if you use 5 keywords, they each have a score of 20/100. The higher the score, the more powerful your keywords can be.
4. Revisit Tag
While not a search engine optimization item, the “revisit” tag may help a search engine spider to return in so many days to re-index the site. This may be of great importance to when your site updates its data and you are trying to get your latest content inside the index.
5. Robots Tag
The Robots Tag was created to provide developers a method of keeping pages out of search engine indexes who cannot upload or control the robots.txt file at their websites. The Robots Tag that may contain one or more of the following keywords without regard to case: none, noindex, nofollow, all, index and follow. Here is a break down of these keywords:
- none – ignore this page (equiv to: noindex, nofollow)
- noindex – page may not be indexed
- nofollow – do not follow links from this page
- all – no restrictions (equiv. to: index, follow)
- index – include this page
- follow – follow links from this page to find other pages
You can also specify actions for specific robots, like GoogleBot for example. This can be helpful if you find you are being crawled frequently by robots not offering any value to your site, and you wish to limit it to just GoogleBot and MSNBot for example.
One new keyword that has appeared is NOODP. This refers to the description displayed on search engine result pages and DMOZ. Some search engines will take the description of your site from DMOZ over your own description tags. Use this tag if you do not wish for this to happen.
6. Put .CSS and JavaScript into External Files
For search engines, excessive or poorly formatted code at the top of your page will have a negative impact on your rankings. By including your CSS and JavaScript in external files, you will increase the amount of text a search engine can read in your page. If you have too much HTML/JavaScript/CSS code, the text content usually won’t be seen entirely.
So what is an example of a good header?
So now, using out example website – www.thelawnman.com.au – which offers lawn mowing services in Sydney, here is an example of a good header targeting three keywords: lawn mowing services, tree lopping, garden maintenance
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en-us">
<head>
<title>Lawn Mowing, Tree Lopping and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Lawn Mowing, Tree Lopping, Garden Maintenance Services, The Lawn Man, Sydney">
<meta name="Description" content="The Lawn Man - Sydney based lawn mowing service with over 10+ yrs experience in garden maintenance. Whether you need lawns mowed or trees lopped, The Lawn Man is for you.">
<meta name="robots" content="noodp">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="index, follow">
<style media="screen" type="text/css">@import url("includes/style.css");</style>
</head>
OK. So there you have it. Of course, this article did not discuss selecting appropriate keywords or displaying appropriate content, but it should be a guide to help you create an effect page header.