Most of us optimize our websites for search engines in order to improve our ranking in SERPs. However, keep in mind that while optimizing for search engines you are may also achieve better user experience.
As you about to learn, determining the title of a webpage can very much influence the page bounce rate or conversion rate. Because search engine traffic reach other pages rather than your homepage, if a page was described incorrectly simply to appear higher in Google, it may result in a way which users arrive and then abandon very quickly.
Search Engine Robots
Most search engines sends out robots, a.k.a. spiders or crawlers, to surf the net and bring that information back to the search engine’s database. When you search, you’re actually searching a database that contains information from all over the web.
If you own a website, you would like to design it in a way that will allow all visiting robots to index all relevant aspects of each page. If your site wasn’t designed correctly, the robots will go around some web pages and it will affect the way your website is shown in SERPs.
Before You Begin
You must optimize each and every page of your site individually. Â Many people think they only need to optimize their home page and then they’re done. Many times when you click on a link from a SERP, it will take you to a specific page on your site.
Keyword Research
Start with researching for keywords that you feel will perform best for each page on your site. The goal is to have a set of 3 keywords per page. The idea is to insert these keywords into the page, by doing so you are helping the robots understand what the page is all about.
The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google’s Keywords Tool. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page.
The Title Tag
You need to take the keywords and key phrases from the research you’ve performed and put it inside the title tag. Make sure that each title is unique and that you select keywords that best describe each page. The title will be the “headline” of the page when it appears in SERPs. Many Web sites suffer poor rankings simply because they miss this crucial step.
The title tags length should not be less than six words and no more than twelve which result in about a range of fifty to eighty characters, this includes spaces, hyphens, commas, etc. You do not want to over kill the keyword density by adding to much info that a search engine may look over.
Meta Description & Meta Keywords
The Meta keyword and description tags allow you to influence the keywords and description of your page in some of the search engines. These tags are typically located in the <HEAD> section of an HTML page.
The main benefit is to help reinforce what your page is about. I recommend no more than two to three keywords in each tag for each page of your site. It’s also important that any keywords listed are directly related to the content on that particular Web page and also appear in the title.
For the Meta description tag, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed in SERPs.
Highlighting Keywords
Just like the title of a document, header tags contain the main message of what your page is all about. <h1> is the best to place for your most important keywords, since that tells the search engines that this is the most important headline. Bolding your text is another way to place emphasis on keywords. This again works for the search engines and visitors of your site.
Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (aka the anchor text) to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Don’t make them guess what’s at the other end with links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words.
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Folder & Filenames
When you create the folder structure, focus on creating short and descriptive folders and filenames. This will help users to understand what the page is about and may help them remember the exact path when they would like to revisit your site. Also, search engine robots will understand and crawl your site much better. As you can see below:
http://www.website.com/music-reviews/britney-spears
Is better than:
http://www.website.com/pages/01bde3assef/x2/1234dse33sew.htm
Navigation
Focus on making your site easy to navigate for both users and robots. Make sure that you create “easy to follow†links to every page of your site. Avoid embedding your site navigation in Flash or other code that the search engines typically ignore or can’t interpret. A site map can help improve the ability of the search engines to crawl your site.
At last, add an XML sitemap, which can be submitted to search engines and provide them with clues about the content of pages on your site.
You can sign up for Google Analytics for free, which easily tracks and measures those things that truly matter.Â
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