In our previous post on Top tips for SEO we discussed some of the basics required to kick start your web page optimisation initiatives.

We introduced the meta headers – ‘title’, ‘description’ and keywords’. In this post we will discuss some basic things that can be done to make your web pages visible to search engines.

Firstly – <title></title>. This is the most important element as, whilst there are many other things that the search engine algorithms will measure, the first thing that any search engine will access on a web page is the title. Stands to reason really. What’s the first thing you look at when browsing through a book shop? Title (maybe author).

So with a web page it is no different. The home page (or index) is the most likely first page for all users so that has to be carefully titled.

Think about the service you are offering. Is your name familiar and, therefore, likely to be used as a search term? Do you want to promote the name of your business? It is a rule of thumb that the easiest thing to optimise for is your own name or name of the business.

Even a name as common as my own (over 5 million in Google) is number 3 for one of my businesses and no 11 for another.  IYES e-Solutions is as you would expect No 1 on Google.

Here is an example of what a meta title should look like:

<title>3D tiles | 3 dimenionsal tiles | sculptured wall tiles | name of business</title>

You will notice that we use key phrases rather than key words here. These reflect what the business is about and immediately the search engines know what the site is about too.

The web site with the above meta title is no 1 on Google out of 54 million results.

The next important meta header is description.

For each page it is important to write a short description in that meta header that reflects the content. The trick is to repeat the main elements of the title in the description.

eg <meta name = “description” content=” Companyname is a design company based in location, specialising in the design of 3 dimensional – 3D – sculptural tiles.” />

The final meta header is ‘keywords’ and whilst these are not as valuable as they once were due to keyword stuffing and spamming, if done carefully can be made to work to your benefit. As with the description, the key is to repeat the key phrases that are in the title.

eg

<meta name =”keywords” content=”3D Tiles, 3 dimensional tiles, sculptural wall tiles, company name, location” />

As you can see there are also only 3 key phrases apart from the company name and location.  I like to repeat the last two key words throughout the site as they do help in the page rankings.

The key phrases should also be repeated throughout the copy on the page (but that is a different skill and topic altogether).

Finally make sure that each page has something different to reflect the content of that page (‘about’ as a title is a waste of time).

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