The head section
The HEAD section is an area of HTML coding at the top of your website page that is not visible to human visitors. This section includes the Title tag, keywords tag, and the description tag. The title tag is the only tag in the HEAD section that you visitors can see but it is only visible in the title bar of the browser window.
Title, Keywords, and Description Tags
Page Title: You page title can be compared to an ad headline. It should only be about 5 to 10 words long and should contain your main 2 to 3 keyword phrases. It should be designed to grab attention and attract clicks from search engine traffic. You can use dashes or commas to separate your terms if needed. Here’s an example of what your title tag should look like:
Keywords META Tag: The keywords META tag is something that can be quite controversial and many webmasters believe it is a waste of time. You can put your list of keywords and common misspellings in here but it is not known whether or not the search engines look at these.
Description META Tag: When it comes to your description tag you have a limit of 155 characters. You should use the first 10 words of this to again grab attention and use your keyword where they make sense. This description will be displayed in some search engine results and it will influence the decision of people whether or not they click through to your website. If you are using longer search terms then this tag could be seen as more important than your title tag.
Robots META Tag: The robots META tag is separate from your robots.txt file and this lets you control what spiders can do on your page
Headings and Links Explained
When it comes to your web pages there are three different heading and subheading tags that are used. These are the H1, H2 and H3 tags and these should contain your core terms and top variations. The heading is usually the first thing on your page but this is not an absolute.
Understanding Body Text and Modifiers
When writing your content if doing it yourself you need to try to write as naturally as possible and try to work your keywords and their variations into what you are writing. Be sure that the keywords you use are appropriate and make sense in your content. You need to focus your content on informing your visitors and over stuffing with keywords will do you more harm than good. Remember if you can’t please your visitors you are doomed in the long run no matter how high you rank in the search engines. You need to write in a way that will sell and persuade your visitors to take action and this is not always easy especially when you are trying to incorporate certain keywords too. What you need to do is focus on placing your search terms where they fit and if you can include all your variations even just once you will be doing a good job.
Creating Your Content the Right Way
When most people map out their keyword strategy for the first time they usually discover that they actually don’t have enough content on their websites to support this map. What this can also suggest is the website is also missing some information that could essentially be very useful to their visitors. When you develop your keyword strategy don’t be surprised if you actually get a great insight as to what your visitors are actually looking for and what they need.
When it comes to creating your content the one thing that you need to avoid is duplicate content.
Duplicate content can be described as a piece of text that is used for numerous pages with only the keywords changed. You need to ensure that the content you are using on your site is 100% original and if you are one of these people who use content from article directories, it would be a good idea to add some additional content onto the page too. Remember you can’t change or alter the article that you take from the article directory so an introductory paragraph or something at the end of the page might help.
First Tier – Your Home Page Content
You should try to include some content on your home page to let your visitors know what your website is about. Now you can rank well with no content but you will need to spend a lot of time building links. It is far easier and a lot more visitor friendly if you add content.
Second Tier – Your Secondary Pages or Category Pages
If you do not have any text content but have just pictures and links on your secondary pages, you face the prospect of these pages being seen by spiders as duplicate content. This may ruin your chances of ranking for these pages. Putting even just a few unique paragraphs on these pages and including some text links with your keywords as the anchor text would work marvelously.
What about User-Generated Content like Forums, Reviews and Feedback?
Blog comments, forum discussions, and user reviews are great ways to build unique content that is normally keyword rich. This content can also be used to get links to your website and provide anchor text to other pages in your website. It can also be great for getting extra visitors from search engine results too.
Using a Blog as a Means of Content
Having a blog is a great way to add more content to your website on a regular basis. If your blog takes off you will be able to interact with your visitors as they leave comments and you will also get the added ability to have others links added to you too. If you can write a post that starts a discussion or debate and gets people’s attention you could get up to 100 links back to the post within a couple of days. If you website is separate from your blog you will still need to create pages that are optimized for your search terms. You will need to take this into consideration if your blog is an add-on. You will also need to think about how you are going to pass on your PageRank to your website’s pages. Blogs are great but they are no substitute for optimized content on your website.
