SEO 101 – Fundamentals

If you were to hire an SEO firm, these are the things they would discuss, when it comes to “fixing your site”.

There are many other things they may talk about, but if you focus on these things first, and you’re aware of what they are, then you’ll stand a much better chance at seducing the search engines.

1. Title Tag
If you were to ask 100 SEO companies what the most important ranking factor was, I’ll bet 95 of them would answer, “the title tag” and I agree. I think the title tag is critical.

This is what displays in the SERPs ( search website Results Pages) as your headline, and it is also what displays across the top blue band in your web browser on someones screen.

Each page should ALWAYS have a unique title tag, specific to just that page. Since it’s the first thing people see in the SERPs, your spelling and grammar are critical, as is including a relevant phrase. Need more title tag info?

2. Description Meta Tag
The description tag is the paragraph that people will see when your page comes up in the search results, so spelling and grammar are crucial there too.

Your description tag should be attracting and designed to attract business, and should sound natural when spoken aloud. Ideally, there could even be a call to action that will almost “force” the reader to’act right now’ and follow your link.

Without a description tag, search engines will frequently display whatever text on your page surrounds the question word, so that may leave you with a less than optimal showing. More description tag info?

3. Keyword Meta Tag
There’s not much of a debate anymore in the S.E.O community as to whether or not they help search engine rankings. The fact is, that they don’t on nearly any of the engines, and certainly not on Google, and it’s not worth spending time to fix old pages.

However, since you’ll never be penalized on any search engines for using a few targeted keywords moderately, they can’t hurt, and who knows when the pendulum might swing the other way? It only takes a few second to add some, so for that reason, I still use ‘em.

Avoid “stuffing’ your keyword metatags with too many keywords, use topical phrases that apply to the content of that particular page, and limit yourself to just a few phrases per page.

While I would not recommend spending money or time going through old pages to add tags, I certainly would recommend removal of any that are abusively stuffed, since they can be seriously penalizing you, and that’s why it’s here on the “need to know” page.
More keyword tag info?

4. Alt Tags
The small yellow box that comes up when your mouse cursor is placed over an image is known as the ALT tag. Each relevant image should have at least one ALT tag with a descriptive key phrase.

For instance, the ALT description could be ‘Blue Widget Distributor logo’ instead of’companynamelogo.jpg’.

ALT tags help individual images get categorized and indexed, and help them show up in Google’s Universal search, image search too.

If your images are also links, you should also know that ALT tag is also used for spread relevance for that phrase to the pages where those links go.

If you’re not adding ALT tags to relevant photos, you’re missing an opportunity.
More ALT tag info?

5. Header Tags
A header tag is simply a properly coded “headline” like a newspaper uses for each story, and the main headline of a page is the H1 tag.

I believe that the a page is given more weight by the search engines if you employ the use of strategic headlines throughout a page.

Having only ONE H1 tag per page is mandatory nowadays, and any extra headlines should be either H2, H3, or even bolded, so they can still look the way you like.

Headlines also help the reader scan your page more quickly, jumping to relevant parts. More description tag info?

Before You Move On…

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