The simple purpose of this SEO Guide is to understand how to effectively manipulate META info and on page content to improve website traffic via natural search and to better serve your visitors with highly relative quality content.
Sections
1. META Titles
2. META Descriptions
3. META Keywords
4. Keyword Research & Google Adwords: Keyword Tool
Section I
META Titles
The META Title of your site is considered one of the most important factors in ranking your site. This is because there is very little room in a title to accurately convey the subject of your page content. Search engines use the titles on your site to “rank” you against other websites targeting similar or identical key terms. Many websites use primitive titles such as their domain or business name, and wonder why they are not performing in natural search for their industry specific key terms. It is important that each title of each page be unique across the site.
How do I write META Titles? Writing META titles is an art, with literally endless possibilities and several correct approaches. Each word should be chosen carefully, and the title as a whole should read reasonably well. Though many titles you see on the Internet may appear to be just thrown together, they may very well be carefully crafted for search engine optimization. The trick is to capture as many variations of key terms as possible while still presenting a coherent title that peaks human interest and increases the likelihood of a click-through.
Research has shown that the beginning words in the title are attributed the most weight. Therefore, try to include your most desired key phrase first. Titles should be written to be compelling and informative, but remain succinct and help branding where applicable. Avoid including sales pitches in titles. Keep this in mind when writing your titles: you know your business and the words you use to describe your services and products, but your customers do not. Consequently, you should optimize for the key words that people are using to search for the services or products you offer. There are several tools available to find out exactly what key words people are searching on. See Section IV: Keyword Research & Using Google Adwords: Keyword Tool for more details.
Your titles are the very first thing a user sees in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). If a user searches for keywords that you have included in your title, and if your site appears in the results of the query, your title will be displayed with the keywords (and synonyms of the keywords) bold. For example, when searching for “clothes” in Google, one of the results is Wikipedia’s article about “Clothing.” The META Title for that particular result is “Clothing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” The word Clothing is bold, even though we searched for clothes. The remainder of the title, “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” is used for branding.
Optimizing your titles to perform for search is only half the battle. The other half is once you have achieved your first page ranking, you need people to actually click on your link (After the click is a whole different topic, but it involves delivering on what the user was expecting, so they don’t click away or “bounce.”). Your CTR (Click Through Rate) is determined by the amount of people who click the link out of those who see it. This is why your titles need to clearly and creatively articulate the content that the user will see should they click your link.
Section II
META Descriptions
If your title has sparked interest in the user, they will most likely then read the description snippet of the result to see if your link is related to what it is they are searching for. This “description” appears beneath the title of each result on the SERPs. Words in your description will appear bold in the result if they match words used in the user’s search query. The description displayed is usually the META description, but it can also be derived from text that exists on the page of the result. Ideally, you want your META description to be displayed as the result description because you will have optimized it to capture and compel the user to click your link. It is important that your META descriptions validate and reinforce your META titles with coherent statements. They should also be unique across your site.
How do I write META descriptions? If optimized correctly, META descriptions will be the reason many users will click on your result in their search queries. Some descriptions should be written to create a sense of urgency, using words like now, today, don’t wait, etc. Other descriptions should be written with action oriented statements that encourage the user to do something.
Compare these two examples of META descriptions: “This web page provides information about how to score a touchdown.” and “Score more touchdowns! Learn football tips and techniques from professionals on scoring touchdowns.” The first, though it does describe what the content is about, is boring and passive. The second example jumps right out and tell the user what they will get and it appeals to the user’s inner desire to score more touchdowns like the pros.
Always consider WHY your customer will be searching for your keywords. Are they looking for information, are they trying to make a purchase, etc. Based on the keyword, try to optimize the description so that it fulfills the request of your customer’s search. Maybe your web page about scoring a touchdown is really a tactic to sell footballs and football apparel. A more fitting description in this sense may be, “Score more touchdowns! Get the football gear, apparel, and accessories you need to top the scoreboards.” Whenever possible, include how the customer will benefit from what it is you are offering – within the context of what they want.
Your META descriptions should also reinforce your META titles. Try to include the same words and even synonyms of the key words that appear in your META title. Exclamation points can be used to instill enthusiasm. If you are answering questions or offering information, do not give away the answer or all the information in your description, otherwise there is little reason for your potential customer to click the link. Cover as much of the relevant content as possible. This will ensure that regardless of what your user may be searching for, they will have a reason to click your link. Each word that is “on-topic” reinforces and strengthens that particular page for that topic.
However, it is absolutely possible to go too far. Terms such as keyword density and keyword proximity play a large role in this. Keyword density is how often your keyword appears within a specific set of text. An example of this is: “Score more football touchdowns! Get the football gear, football apparel, and football accessories you need to top the football scoreboards.” This particular example uses the word football too much, thus the keyword density is too high.
Another option is to replace instances of the word football with closely related words, such as sports, gaming, etc. This is where Keyword proximity comes into play. Keyword proximity is how close each word in your key phrase appears next to each other. You can replace some instances of football, but choosing which to replace depends on your preferred keyword. Do you want to acquire traffic from football gear or sports gear, football apparel or sports apparel, and so on? If your description contained “football gear and sports apparel,” football apparel and sports gear would certainly be considered for your page, but you are telling the search engines that your page is really more relevant to football gear and sports apparel.
After all that is done, you must ensure that the content on the page, after the click, delivers what you offered. You will not satisfy everyone, but just know it will hurt you more than help if you do not take care in satisfying your visitors. Just as a quality restaurant aims to serve its patrons with the best food, the best service and the best experience – you must to do the same with your web content.
Section III
META Keywords
Once the ‘be all end all’ for search engine optimization, this META tag was exploited to the ‘nth degree upon the inception of SEO. Thus, it is now one of the lowest weight factors involved in ranking your site. Regardless of that fact, it is important nonetheless to properly tag each page with related keywords. Covering all the bases is the best way to ensure peak performance in search engine optimization.
How do I write META keywords? Keywords are just that, words that are key points of your page’s content. Usually separated by commas and very rarely multiple words, it is simply a comma separated list of words and phrases specific to your content. Writing keywords for your web page content is very straight forward. The META keywords should correspond to the information in the META title, the META description, and the content that is on the page.
For example, if you have a webpage about football in the United States for specific colleges, your keyword list may look something like this: “football, united states, america, college, foot ball, university, state, montana, florida, texas”. Depending on the content of the page, you may add more keywords as necessary. For example, if your page is about the footballs, and equipment someone might be interested in for football in the United States for those specific colleges, you should add gear, equipment, sports, shoulder pads, helmets, teeth guards, and so on until you have covered the content in your article.
Section IV
Keyword Research & Using Google Adwords: Keyword Tool
This is Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool. The purpose of this tool is to provide a very good indication of the key phrases that people are actually typing in to Google. The results are broken down in a variety of methods and can be sorted by relevance, search volume, and many other ways.
To use the tool, simply enter the key words or key phrases you want to look up. In general, you will want to ensure the “Use synonyms” box is checked. This means that the tool will look up words that are closely related to what you have entered. A good example is if you type in clothes, it will also consider terms related to your search that include clothing.
An important setting is the location. Above the Keyword Variations tab, the default for those of us in the USA is, “Results are tailored to English, United States”. This setting can be modified if you are trying to get results from Canada, or any other demographic. For example purposes, I will leave it set to United States for this document.
When you first arrive to the page, it will prompt you to enter the search phrases you want to look up as well as a series of characters to identify yourself as a human, and not a bot trying to automate queries against the tool. This is a one time step while you are using the tool. Note: If you have had the page open, but not used it for a period of time, your session will “expire.” If this happens, simply refresh the page and you can enter the characters again to resume working with the tool.
Underneath where you enter the keywords, there is a “Filter my results” option that displays some filter options. The options presented here are primarily for more advanced queries. In general, you can ignore this until you are ready to start analyzing analytics and statistics to really refine the key terms you choose to target.
How do I read the results? By default, the resulting keywords of your query are listed by relevance. This means that the list will begin with key phrases that are more relevant to what you have entered. By clicking on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” above this column, we can re-sort the keywords by search volume. This is helpful when the only results you wish to examine are those with a higher search volume.
For example, I have entered football and clicked “Get keyword ideas” with “Use synonyms” checked. The first result in the list is “football tickets” as that is the most relevant to what we have entered. The next result is “football,” but its search volume is much greater than that of football tickets. Note: This tells us that Google considers “football tickets” to be highly relevant to football, and perhaps even more relevant than the word “football” itself. I find it extremely interesting that at the time of writing this, football tickets shows up before football in the list when sorted by relevance. This tells us that Google considers searches for “football” to be an indication that the user is “most likely” looking for tickets. Knowing what Google considers more relevant and less relevant is invaluable information. Be sure not to overlook the potential of that aspect of this tool.
Still using football as an example, I am going to re-sort the results by Approx Avg Search Volume by clicking the column label. After doing this, we notice that football tickets is no longer at the top of the list, but rather football is. It is obvious to see that the volume for “football” is 30.4 million and therefore has secured its spot as #1 in search volume for this list of terms. This allows us to see the list of results from our query in order by the most search volume to the least.
Let’s use a key phrase with a smaller result set. Using “football tickets” as our example now, the volume displayed is 301,000. Again, sorting by relevance shows that “lsu football tickets,” “usc football tickets,” and “football ticket” are the highest relevant key phrases to our query of “football tickets.” Sorting by average search volume tells us that the terms with the highest search volume are: football ticket, college football tickets, alabamafootball tickets, football season tickets, ohio state football tickets, and tickets for football.
Below the “Keywords related to term(s) entered” section, occasionally there is another section labeled “Additional keywords to consider.” This is displayed as a more broad result set. With our example football tickets, some of the terms listed here are tickets, event tickets, ticket, tickets online, and several others along that line. These terms are less relevant to our search, and can have very little to do with the term or terms entered in the search query.
What’s the purpose of all this? The purpose is to provide words that we want to include in our titles and optimization of content to capture the audience that is typing in these search terms. We can clearly see what it is people are looking for, and it is our job to make sure that they get what they want when they look for it. Just including the words that are listed from this tool is not enough. The content should deliver on what the user was actually looking for. This draws in a slew of dynamics, some of which are explained in other sections of this document, but the general concept is to ensure your content is in line with what you are optimizing it for.