The <Head> Tag
- Title Tag: You should always include your keyword/keyword phrase in your title tag. Place your main keyword phrase at the beginning of your title tag. Studies show that keywords placed in the beginning of the tag have a bigger weight. If you have a company name that you would like to include, place it at the end with a seperation ” | “.
- Meta Keywords: If we go back to the 90′s , I would strongly recommend employing the keyword tag. Nowadays, no search engines even pays attention to this tag. Only Yahoo still uses this tag but not for ranking purposes. It helps the search engines know what your page is containing. There is no more use of employing the meta keyword tag anymore.
- Meta Description: Even though this tag isn’t used for ranking, it is important to include your keyword phrases in the description tag. Once a search query is performed, the serach engine will bold the relevant keywords to the query. This is very appealing to the human eye and can influence people to click on you, thus enhancing your website’s traffic.
- Meta Robots: This tag isn’t necessary at all. However if you choose to employ it, make sure not to enter any directives that will block the search engine to crawl certain pages of your website.
- Keyword Placement: Place your keywords the closest possible to the domain name. Remember, the closer, the better. Try eliminating any elements that are unnecessary. A URL that looks like this “example.com/keyword” is much better than “example.com/folder/subfolder/keyword”
- URL Length: The shorter the URL the better. It appears that shorter URLs have better rankings than long ones. Also people seem to like shorter, compact URLs and get linked to more often than long boring ones.
- Word Separators: The word separator that keeps appearing everywhere and is the most used is the hyphen. It appears that the hyphen is the most “liked” by search engines. There are rumors that the underscore is good also but this has never been confirmed. So for now stick to the hyphens. Don’t mix the URL with the domain name. It is recommended to NEVER put hyphens in your domain name. Example.com vs exam-ple.com, it is clear the example.com is a way better choice.
- Keyword Repetition: Nobody has an answer of exactly how many times you should repeat your keyword in your webpage. However, through our campaigns, we have seen that repeating your keyword 3x – 4x per page is enough. This doesn’t include your keyword variations.
- Keyword Variations: A lot of studies show that using multiple keyword variations can grant you better rankings. I recommend using 2 – 3 keyword variations and spread them out through the whole web page.
- Keyword Density: This is a way of calculating if you over did your keyword repetition. A lot of people say that this is a waste of time and it is. No search engine has been confirmed of using this as a ranking factor. You can calculate your keyword density for yourself but it does not affect your ranking at all.
- Headlines: The headline tags should be applied properly because they do help your rankings. The <h1> tag should only be used once per page and should contain your main keyword. As for the other headline tags such as <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc… use them only if necessary because they have little to no weight on your rankings.
- Alt Tags: As you know, search engines don’t have eyes so any images that are on your webpage are invisible to search engines so adding an <alt> attribute with a keyword in it is very useful. It will tell the search engine what the image is and show relevancy between your content and your images.
- Image File Names: You should save your file names as the keywords your optimizing on your website. There’s a lot of traffic that can come to you through image sharing so make sure to have them names properly.
- Bold: The <strong> attribute should be used only with your keywords or keyword phrases. This tells the search engine that the word in particular is important and he takes notice of it.
- Italic: The <emphasize> attribute is very similar to the <strong> attribute. Use it only where you have to.
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