Search Engine Optimization Crash Course

To have a successful internet marketing plan, optimizing your website in order to rank high in search engines is a must! Before engaging in a search engine optimization company (SEO for short), it is a good idea to educate yourself first!  I have written this article for people that may be starting out.  After all, I can relate because I have been learning SEO as I gain more experience in the internet marketing industry myself!

Title Tags
The title tag is the line of text that runs across the top of your internet browser when you are on a website. For example, in the image below, the title tag of the website www.techwyse.com is highlighted.

The title tag should be structured to include relevant, flowing key terms and phrases that relate to your website and the content on that specific page. There is no specific number of characters that should be used, but a suggested amount is between 50 to 60 characters or approximately ten words. The title tag will appear in a search engine query (see image below), therefore should make sense to the user. Your website is more likely to be selected in the search engine if the title tag makes sense.

Description
The description of a website page is something that is not visible to the everyday user. It is coded into the meta tag of a page. See image below:

Again, there is no specific number of words or characters that must be used, however a recommendation of 140 to 150 is suggested. Any more than that will not be picked up by a search engine and possibly detrimental. Again, the key words used in the description should be relevant to the content of the page and the title tag. Keywords
Keywords have become less important to a search engine but still are used. Keywords are also coded into the meta tag of a page. See image below:
 

 

A recommended number of characters for the keyword meta tag is between 240 and 250. Again, the keywords should all relate to the information and content that is on that dedicated website, otherwise a search engine could consider this spammy.

Keyword Nesting
Organizing your key words in groups within the group so the search engine can read and understand many different variations of those terms. For example, let’s use the title tag of one of our clients www.matrixpost.com.

Title Tag - Digital Video Production Services Toronto Corporate Promotional Film Company

Look at the different variations of this title tag that the search engine can read and make sense of:

 

Digital Video Production
Digital Video Production Services
Video Production
Video Production Services
Digital Video Production Services Toronto
Production Services
Production Services Toronto
Toronto Corporate Promotional Film
Toronto Corporate Promotional Film Company
Corporate Promotional Film
Corporate Promotional Film Company
 
H Tags
An H tag refers to a style that is applied to the content in the body of your website page that is embedded within the code. If you were to view an H Tag in the code, it would look something like this:

 

<h1>A search engine such as Google, Yahoo! And Msn would see this text as more important</h1>
<p>…and this text would be less important to a search engine</p>

Here is an example of an ‘H’ tag on our website.

Planning & Development is a term that is that we would like a search engine to recognize as more important on this page, therefore, we have inserted it into an <h1> tag.

<h1><ahref="javascript:if(disp_div==false){disp_div=true;animatedcollapse.hide(’expand’);}else
{disp_div=false;animatedcollapse.show(’expand’);}">Planning &<br />
<span>Development</span></a></h1>

Anchor Links
An anchor link is the actual text on a website that links through to another page. In most cases, links stand out from the rest of the page. For example, visit the internet marketing website TechWyse. "TechWyse" is the anchor text. To get a better idea of how this looks in the code, see the example below:

 

<a href="http://www.techwyse.com/">TechWyse</a>That sums up your first crash course on Search Engine Optimization. When choosing an SEO company, use your new skills to ensure you are getting what you are paying for. That would be my best advice to any SEO newbies!

 

 

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