How to SEO your site: Episode 1 - Marking up your website
This series is looking at how to SEO your site properly and we'll be starting at the very beginning; looking at your templates and what information you need to focus on. This includes the correct use of header tags, appropriate title structure and meta tags.
Episode 1: Marking up your template for SEO
Time after time I see bloggers worrying about keyword density and researching which keyphrases they need to focus on in their content... Yet they've never actually checked whether their Wordpress template even has an H1 tag - it's an odd balance. I know a lot of bloggers don't want to be "hands on" in terms of code but the reality of it is that you probably need to be. So let's look at the important factors:
Title tags
The title tag is one of the most crucial elements to get right when SEO'ing your website; the reason for this is because that's what your link appears like in Google. Let me explain using the below example/screenshot:
The "Kitten - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" line is the title tag of that particular page. When you're scanning through a list of search terms it's the thing you read the first and it's an element that Google places a lot of weight on. Therefore it's important that you structure your title tags correctly; far before considering keyword usage you need to ensure that you're presenting the most relevent information first.
Therefore if you've got content that people will be searching, such as blog posts or articles - you'll want the title tag to contain the article title above anything else. I recommend the structure of "Post title - Website Name" e.g. "Why I love Kittens - Seopher.com". This means that if someone searches for "why I love kittens" the first terms Google matches are the first few words in the title tag - thus increasing relevance.
Header tags
It's important in SEO terms to ensure that you're set up to use header tags correctly because proper semantic markup helps Google work out what content is relevent on your website. Therefore you should ensure that every single template you're using has at least an H1 tag. Typically I'd recommend using the H1 tag on the homepage (and other non-search-worthy-content pages) to mark up the site branding. I.e. wrap "This is my website, about this, that and the other" in H1 tags to support your website branding.
However, if you're on a content page (i.e. the blog post explaining "Why I love kittens") then it would be more prudent to make the blog title the H1 tag and do away with the branding. It ultimately depends on your goals but to maximise your natural search engine traffic it's worth focusing your header tags on the entry point (on the homepage the entry point is for the branding, the overall mission statement... On individual content pages the entry point is the post title).
Meta tags
I have a different attitude to most convential SEO writers because I have a very dogmatic and real understanding of the search engine market. Whatever statistic you read you can ignore it; Google owns 90% of the search engine market. People have disagreed with me numerous times over that statistic but I've been around on the Internet long enough to see how much traffic each search engine sends. See my proof on my has Google got 97% of the search market post.
Because Google is the only search engine worth catering for, meta tags are an increasingly pointless gesture. Adding meta-keywords and meta-description tags to all your content is more hassle than it's worth for the most part (especially for bloggers). Google doesn't care what meta information you enter for the most part; it cares more about your title and header tags (as well as keyword density etc, but more on that another day). As far as I'm concerned it's only worth adding a meta-description tag on your homepage so that you can write a bespoke strapline to support your title - which is exemplified below:
Using the same example as before, the content that sits below the "Kitten - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" is where your meta-description content would sit. It's only worthwhile adding that to the homepage as far as I'm concerned because realistically that's the only one you'll be bothered to maintain. Google doesn't add much weight too it so I don't see the point in spending time focusing on a token gesture that 97% of the market will ignore anyway.
Images and accessibility
SEO is an accessibility bi-product on the most part. If you use images you MUST have alt and title attributes for them because Google counts that as information. Ensuring your site is largely accessible is a good step for SEO because it means that non-conventional browsers can interact with your content well. This means that search engine spiders can also index your content more effectively and that's a desirable thing.
I hope episode one has been useful. In episode two I'm going to talk about marking up your content, keyword density and generally SEO'ing things that fall outside of the template.
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