This blog will show you how you can now make changes to your websites to improve your visibility on search engines.
title tags
The Title of each page on your website should be an accurate, concise description of the content on the page. This is a very important element of “On Page” Search Engine Optimisation. Here is a brief outline of how we recommend writing title tags:
Title Tag Length
Most search engines show between 65-75 characters. In the past we would have recommended keeping the title tag to less than 69 characters, due to Google displaying only this number of characters. However, nowadays Google has more control over what it shows as a Title tag in it’s search results, depending on what the search term is. For this reason we now recommend simply keeping this below 100 characters.
Title Tag Structure
It’s important to have a good Title tag structure – The closer the main keywords are to the beginning of the title tag, the more important they will be seen by search engines. If possible the title tag should read as a meaningful sentence, however, depending on the number of keywords covered.
Include Branding?
It is very important to include branding on at least some of the pages on your website. This really should be compulsory for the homepage, contact, about and other information pages. However it can also be useful to include branding on other title tags, depending on your website pages, as this can improve your overall branding and also click through rates.
Meta Tags
There are quite a selection of different Meta tags that can be included within the code of your website. Meta Tags are intended to provide information about the website. Here is some information on some of the main tags that are used:
Meta Description
The meta description is a short description of the page’s content – This is a longer description than the Title Tag and will normally be visible under the Title Tag on Search Results. However, as with the Title Tag, Google may choose it’s own description depending on the search term. Although, at the start of 2016, we have occasionally been seeing longer descriptions, we still recommend keeping Meta Descriptions as close to 159 characters as possible.
Meta Keywords
Although Meta Keywords are no longer considered important to Google and BING, we believe it is still important to include them. However do take care not to “keyword stuff” these. Simply include the main phrases for your pages. We recommend including these for a few reasons: Some search engines out there may still use them; they don’t hinder results on any search engines; they may be used in some way again in the future.
Heading Tags
Heading Tags are used in websites in a similar way to documents. Each document should only have one main heading and can have multiple sub headings. The same theory applies to websites. Each page should have one main heading; known as a H1 Tag and can have multiple sub headings (H2, H3, H4 etc…).
