HTML Search Engine Optimization: Content « Taylor Digital Web Design Blog

HTML Search Engine Optimization: Content

By Taylor Digital Wednesday October 28, 2009

This article is the first in our new series “HTML Search Engine Optimization“. Over the next few weeks we’ll be explaining more about how to better optimize your web sites HTML code and how it can help your ranking in major search engines. In this series we will cover such topics as content, code, links, competitor research, web site submission, and pay per click.

Optimizing Web Site Content

If you are going to optimize your web site, the first place to start is with your content. One essential item in search engine optimization (SEO) is making sure that your web sites content is optimized. Below you can find important aspects of your content that should not be looked over.

Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. -Google Meta Tags

Title Tags

The title tag is a required tag used to define the title of each page on a web site. The title tag is used in a browsers tab, when adding to browser favorites and in search engine results. To keep with best practices, it is recommended that you limit the title length to 65 characters (with spaces). If you go beyond that limit there is a good chance your website title will be interrupted with a “…” in a search engine listing. To help each page within your site carry value in search engines it is best to incorporate keyword phrases within the title.

<head>
<title>Keyword Rich Page Title</title>
<meta name="author" content="Taylor Digital, LLC - www.taylordigital.com" />
<meta name="description" content="Your keyword rich description for search engine indexing will help your professional site grab attention." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Your keyword rich marketing,sales-pitch meta keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space" />
<link rel="Shortcut Icon" type="image/ico" href="/favicon.ico" />
</head>

Meta Descriptions

The meta description is a required tag used to define the content located on each page of a web site. The meta description will be found below a page title when looking at search engine results. This tag will contribute to a search engine ranking and will influence a user to click on the search engine site listing. The meta description is a 170-200 character description of a pages content.

<head>
<title>Keyword Rich Page Title</title>
<meta name="author" content="Taylor Digital, LLC - www.taylordigital.com" />
<meta name="description" content="Your keyword rich description for search engine indexing will help your professional site grab attention." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Your keyword rich marketing,sales-pitch meta keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space" />
<link rel="Shortcut Icon" type="image/ico" href="/favicon.ico" />
</head>

Keyword & Phrases

Now that we have explained the purpose of the title tag and meta descriptions it is important to talk about keywords and phrases. The keyword tag is used to define very specifically, the content located on a page. Getting a high rank in search engines is not obtained by putting magical keywords into your pages. The keywords you are using in this area must not only be relevant to your content, it must also be contained within that page as well. You should pick around 10-15 keywords you have used within your content based off of the pages main focus. If you have more than one focus you may want create new pages for the additional topics.

<head>
<title>Keyword Rich Page Title</title>
<meta name="author" content="Taylor Digital, LLC - www.taylordigital.com" />
<meta name="description" content="Your keyword rich description for search engine indexing will help your professional site grab attention." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Your keyword rich marketing,sales-pitch meta keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space" />
<link rel="Shortcut Icon" type="image/ico" href="/favicon.ico" />
</head>

Relevant Text

While gathering content for a web page can take some time, it is very important that the content created on each page is relevant to the topic. A good goal to have for each page would be to maintain at least two keyword rich paragraphs (at least 250 words). This will help your page get picked up in search engines and add value at the same time.

Intelligent URLs

When creating a URL, the more obvious the better. If someone can look at a URL and know right away what the content of that page is without visiting it, it is an intelligent URL. Many URLs are e-mailed, written down, shared and identified by search engines on a daily basis. The more concise a URL, the easier to copy and paste or spread across the net in a dozen different ways. It is a good practice to avoid using a series of numbers and symbols in your URL. If your URL is company23/shoe/831/catagory333/ it would be better to change it to /nike/shoe/air-jordan/mens. Just by looking at the words that were used (instead of numbers) intelligent URL you know what company, product group, product and who the product is intended for.

XML Site Map

A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML sitemaps are used by Goggle to gather information about the site. A sitemap will display all of the pages within your web site dynamically in an organized fashion. This is important feature to have, especially as pages are archived and only found through user searches.

Having an XML sitemap allows your site to be indexed by major search engines easily. If search engines and web crawlers can find every page on your site regardless of how well linked your pages are, you can make sure every page is indexed. Having a sitemap is especially critical for new web sites as it can take many months for search engines to crawl your site and they may never crawl all of your pages. Adding a sitemap will expedite this process as they know exactly where to look. You can find a two page example of how sitemaps are formed. There are many different ways this can be done that depend entirely on the content being listed.

Crawling is how Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Our crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits of each these websites, it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index. -Google Support

Does your company need a better Search Engine ranking and increased traffic? For a customized Search Engine Optimization program, Contact Taylor Digital Today.