Basic SEO for Newbies – Tags

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the work that has to be done in order to see a website or blog appear in search results of search engines for chosen keywords or phrases. A website without proper SEO is like a beautiful brochure in a close drawer.

All pages of a site have to contain three important tags that only search engines can see to index websites, which are a “Title”, a “Description” and a “Keywords” tag. This information is available between the <head> and </head> tags, the part of a website visitors can’t see.

Search Engines Optimization for a WordPress blog is easy as there are plug-ins available that automatically select a title, description and keywords based on the post. That is not the same story for a regular HTML website where everything has to be done manually page by page, and this can be really painful when you have a hundred pages.

A good title must contain the name of your website and a short descriptive title of the page with two or three main keywords for a maximum of 100 characters. The description has to describe the content of the page with the main keywords or phrases you want to target. A good description is  less than 160 characters, but it will work for 200 or 250 characters in some search engines.  And finally, the keywords tag has to contain a selection of words present in the page and separated by commas. It is important to make a fair selection and not include too many keywords that would not do any good.

Some webmasters use the power of Dreamweaver and web templates to easily add an identical description and identical keywords for the whole site, but it is not really the best option. Each page has different content, so it is logical that the 3 tags reflect this and be different so each page appears different when indexed. Some web designers make very beautiful sites but unfortunately, they are not SEO friendly.

I suggest that you check in Google for the main keywords of your vertical and see how concurrent websites have their title and description indexed. More SEO posts will follow later.

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