As an SEO expert will tell you, the best time to start implementing SEO techniques into your website is when your website is still on the design board. If you start implementing SEO techniques right from this stage, you can be assured of being able to take advantage of these techniques to the fullest extent.
Most people will have you believe that implementation of SEO techniques is best left to SEO experts. But, if you are willing to invest time and effort into this activity on a regular basis, there is no reason why you cannot incorporate SEO techniques on your website on your own. However, it is important to remember that SEO technique implementation is not a one-time activity. Search engine algorithms keep changing and it will be important for you to keep up with the changes to stay ahead in the game.
Here are some SEO tips for Titles, Meta- Tags and URL Structure that you can start implementing as you start to plan your web design:
Title
The title tells a visitor, whether it is a human or a search engine crawler, the topic of a particular page. The tag is placed within the tag of the HTML document. Ideally, a unique title should be created for each page on your site.
Whenever your website shows up in search results, the contents of the title tag are displayed in the first line of the results. Words in the title that appear in the user’s search query are bolded. This can help users identify if the page is likely to be relevant to their search or not.
The title for your homepage may be used to list the name of your website and business and could also be used to include other bits of important information like the physical location of your business or if it is a only an online business, the title tag can be used to display the highlight of your products and services. There should be a self explanatory title tag for every page on your website and it should accurately describe the focus of that particular page as well as include your site or business name.
Some best practices to follow with Title tags:
• Accurate Description
Each title should accurately describe the contents of the page. Ensure that the titles are not vague or left at default setting so that they show titles like «Untitled» or «New Page 1.»
• Unique Title Pages
It is important for a search engine crawler to distinguish one page from another on your website. This is why it is important that you have a unique title tag for each of your pages. If you use a single tag across all or many pages on your website, it is bound to make the web crawler assume that they are one and the same.
• Be Brief, but descriptive
Ensure that all your title tags are brief. If they are too long, they will not be shown in their entirety. Only a portion of the title, deemed most relevant by the search engine crawler will be displayed to the user. Hence, it is best if your title tags are brief. Avoid title tags that are long and have little relevance to the user when they are displayed on the search results page.
Meta Tags
A meta tag is another opportunity for you to explain what the content of a page is to a user, both human and robotic. While a page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. And, like the tag, the description meta tag is placed within the tag of your HTML document.
Description meta tags are most likely to be used by search engines as snippets for your pages. In the absence of a good and descriptive meta tag, the search engine may use a relevant section of your website to be displayed along with the link. However, it is best that you control what is used as a snippet by ensuring the meta tag is most descriptive of the page’s content. The meta tag also comes in very useful if the search engine crawler cannot find the relevant sections of content on your page to display along with the search results.
Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user’s query. This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for and can bring immense traffic to your website by making it easy for users to identify the exact content of the page.
Best Practices for Meta Tags:
1. Accurate Summary
Your meta tag should be an accurate summary of your web page. It is useful for both the search engine to identify the contents of your page as well as to the user to identify if the content on your page is what he is looking for.
2. What To Avoid
• Avoid meta tags that are not relevant to your web page
• Avoid meta tags that are generic and do not give information pertaining to the content on the page, like ‘This is a web page’.
• Avoid stuffing the meta tags with keywords. Search engine crawlers can see through this ruse and it may affect your ranking negatively.
3. Unique Descriptions
There are many advantages to having unique title tags for each of your web page. Apart from helping the search engine crawler identify them as separate pages, it serves another very important function. If all the meta tags on your website are different for different pages, then more than one page from your website may show up in the search results, depending on how many meta tags are most relevant to the user’s search query. Thus, you must avoid using the same meta tags for all pages or across large groups of pages.
Reference Website: http://www.pickysite.com/blog/search_engine_optimization/69.html
