Optimizing Your Site with Tags
Title Tag
The title tag is possibly your most important consideration when you try to raise your search-engine rankings for a particular keyword or phrase. Search engines use the text contained within the title tag as a primary factor to determine what the content of a certain web page is about. The text that makes up your title tag is also the clickable link that typically appears on the search-engine result pages when your site appears in the rankings. The title tag text also appears at the top of a web browser when someone is visiting a particular page on your web site.Limit your title tags to 65 characters or less because most search engines do not display any more than that. Your title tag should be a concise statement summarizing the main point of your content, and should be compelling enough to encourage search-engine users to click the link and visit your site.
To increase relevancy for the keywords or phrases that you have included in your title tags, consider naming your files based on those keyword terms. See the example below (top portion of the WordPress Post Editing box)… do you see where it says “Permalink: http://webseoblogtips.com/keyword-density/”?
The web page file name is the words “keyword-density”, which is also my main keyword phrase for this article. (The below example image that shows the words “Keyword Density – Blog Tips for SEO Page Rank!“, is not to be mistaken for the title tag. This would be the description of your page, by WordPress default, wrapped in the “h1″ header tag, which you will learn about below!)
When you link from one page to another on your web site, your link text should be closely related to the title tag of the page linked to. Your title tag must also be unique for each and every page of your web site and should include one or two of your keywords that you want the page to rank for. Due to the ranking influence that the title tag possesses, a search-engine penalty is likely to result if the same title tag is repeated across all pages.
If you are creating your own Static HTML website through software similar to Dreamweaver, then you most likely know how to add this information. Considering that these lessons are based on the WordPress-based site, the story is a little different.
Some WordPress themes have an area for adding a custom title, but not all. If your theme does not have this option, then by default WordPress creates the title tag from the Heading Title of your article. If the title to your article happens to be longer than 65 characters like a few of mine, then your title will be cut off in the search results. The solution to your WordPress Theme based site is further down this lesson, so keep reading.
I have written an article about Title Tags, in which I will also leave the link at the end of this lesson for you to read… this article goes into much greater depth.
Optimize Your Meta Description Tag
You should optimize each and every meta description tag on your web site, because meta description tags are part of the display information that visitors see when your site is listed in the search engines.The meta description tag contains a brief description of what your web page is about, and although not as influential as it once was in the search-engine ranking process. The meta description tag is important because you can use it as a method to deliver your marketing message and entice search-engine visitors to click on your listing versus clicking on your competition’s listing.
Create a few compelling sentences describing your product, services, or web site content, and place them in your meta description tag, not to exceed 160 characters (most search-engines use the maximum of 160 characters in their search results pages). The description should interest the potential visitor and tempt that person to click your search-engine results link.
You may be tempted to replicate the same tag throughout your entire web site, but this practice is likely to hurt your rankings; the major search engines could determine that all your pages are duplicates.
Not all search engines use the meta description tag in the results pages. Google, for example, generates its own description based on the content contained within the particular web page. Whether Google uses meta description tags in its ranking algorithms is not known. Still, you should take advantage of the search-engine spiders that do use the meta description tag in their ranking algorithms. Less-popular but still-significant search engines such as Ask.com, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb still do use the meta description tag in their results.
Optimize Your Meta Keywords Tag
Perhaps the least important factor in optimizing a web site for search-engine rankings is the use of the meta keyword tag. Similar to the meta description tag, the meta keyword tag contains a list of keywords or phrases, separated by commas, that describe the subject matter of a particular web page.Today, the search engines give little consideration to meta keyword tags. Still, you should not skip implementing this tag on all your web pages. What sort of significance the search engines may place on this tag in the future is impossible to know, and although you are not likely to see an increase in your rankings with today’s ranking algorithms, anything is possible down the road.
In the mid-1990’s, back when search engines were much less sophisticated, the meta keyword tag was used by the search engines to determine what keywords and phrases a web page should rank for. As you can imagine, it did not take long before the meta keyword tag was exploited to obtain search-engine rankings for keywords or phrases that had nothing to do with the actual content of certain pages.
For each page on your web site, generate a short list of no more than ten keywords or phrases and include them in the meta keyword tag. Do not repeat keywords or phrases, and be sure that each web page on your site has a unique meta keyword tag. Again, although you may be tempted to duplicate this tag throughout your site, your rankings could decrease as a result due to duplicate content.
SEOCentro.com offers an invaluable tool to help analyze your meta tags of any of the completed articles on your site.
This tool analyzes every meta tag of a web page and offers suggestions to improve those tags. It will analyze the length and relevancy of your title, description, and keywords meta tags; it also verifies that all the tags are formatted correctly. Incorrectly formatted tags can render your HTML unreadable by the search engines, causing a ranking penalty, and they could prevent a web browser from loading your page correctly, thus rendering it unreadable to human visitors as well.
Try to make sure your meta tags follow the guidelines and suggestions mentioned by the tool. Keep your title, description, and keywords meta tags within the length requirements. This tool can also be used to analyze your competitors’ meta tags if you are curious to see what they have done differently.
This tool also analyzes the size and load time of the page. Pages that are too large or take too long to load can aggravate your visitor and push them out the door.
Your Title, Description and Keywords Tags Solution for WordPress
There is a solution to all your WordPress worries for the Title tag, Description tag, and the Keywords tag… the All in One SEO Pack plug-in. There are other plug-ins available, but this is the one that I use for my blog, and that I would recommend. This plug-in allows you to create your own title tag text and counts the characters as you type showing you if you need to shorten your title tag. It will do the same for your description tag.Once you have installed the All in One SEO Pack in to your WordPress-based site, and enabled the plug-in, you will have a section to add this information at the bottom of your ‘Edit Post’ page as shown below.
SEO Effects of the Anchor Tag
Choosing appropriate anchor text for both your incoming and outgoing links can play a large role in increasing your search-engine rankings for the terms and keywords your site is targeting. Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a hyperlink. An effective use of anchor text is to describe the content of the page being linked to directly in the anchor text. In order to create anchor text in your WordPress-based site’s content, follow the instructions below.For the Visual tab in your WordPress Edit Box, highlight the wording that you would like to use for the link, click on the link icon (looks like the ‘infinity’ sign or a flattened number 8 turned on its side), when the ‘insert/edit link’ box opens, paste your hyperlink in to the ‘Link URL’ box, click the ‘Target’ drop-down menu, choose to open link in a new window, or open link in same window, type in a title of the link if you’d like to, then click insert.
For the HTML tab in your WordPress Edit Post box, you will need to highlight the wording that you would like to use for your link, then click on the word “link”, a box will open, then you paste the hyperlink that you want the text to go to in the box, click OK.
Below is an example of what the anchor text will look like in the HTML tab of your WordPress Edit Box.
<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Example Anchor Text</a>
When building links to your web page, you should always attempt to acquire links with highly descriptive anchor text. Search engines use anchor text to determine the theme of the page being linked to, and anchor text is an important factor in search engine’s ranking algorithms.
Do not overuse one specific variation of anchor text. The search engines will rank you higher if you include some variety with your terms when using your anchor text selection. If you recall, we discussed keyword variety in the LSI Keyword Research lesson… for a refresher, visit
2 – Keywords & Your Web Site! – LSI Keyword Research.
Add Emphasis with Header Tags
You can use HTML header tags to apply significance to keywords or phrases within a web page. Placing a selection of text within a header tag tells the search-engine spiders that the text is of a certain level of importance. Search-engine ranking algorithms place emphasis on text enclosed within header tags when determining where pages should be ranked for these terms. Much like the other tasks of this chapter, the use of header tags is standard practice and should be viewed as a best-practices starting point.Header tags are arranged in preset levels of importance ranging from <h1>, the most important, to <h6>, the least important. Unless it is modified through other means, text enclosed within an <h1> tag appears larger than its neighboring text on the web page, and text enclosed within an <h6> tag appears smaller.
Header tags can be used anywhere within the <Body> tag of an HTML document, and the appearance of the resulting formatting can be altered with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is beyond the scope of this training. Their syntax would look similar to this in your Edit Post box, for the HTML tab:
<h1>Text enclosed within a Header 1 Tag</h1>
<h2>Text enclosed within a Header 2 Tag</h2>
Beyond using header tags to highlight text on your pages, you can use them to logically format your content into hierarchal topics and subtopics as shown below.
Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?
Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake
Too Firm?
Too Soft?
Choosing the Right Mattress
—————————————————————————-The heading hierarchy reads like this:
h1 tag: (Page Topic) Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?
h2 tag: (Main Topic) Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake
h3 tag: (Sub Topic) Too Firm?
h3 tag: (Sub Topic) Too Soft?
h2 tag: (Main Topic) Choosing the Right Mattress
Beyond using header tags to highlight text on your pages, you can use them to logically format your content into hierarchal topics and subtopics. For example, if you are writing an information page about PPC management, place that key phrase in a header tag like <h1>PPC Management</h1>. If within the same topic there is the subtopic “PPC Management Services”, place that key phrase in a sub-header like <h2>PPC Management Services</h2>.
To choose a header tag in your Edit Post box (Visual tab), you will see the drop-down menu in the upper left corner, marked ‘Format’. All you need to do is similar to creating anchor text… highlight the word that you want to add the tag for, click on the drop-down box and choose which heading format, it’s that easy (to add the header tag in the HTML tab, you would need to do it manually as shown above). See image below!
Do not expect drastic increases in rankings for keywords and phrases
highlighted by header tags, but always try to use them wherever
appropriate in your web page creation. You are providing a service to
both the search engines and your visitors by visually emphasizing the
important topics.Text Modifiers
You can modify text on a web page to emphasize important keywords and phrases to help search engines and human visitors identify the main topic of that page; this can lead to higher rankings for those terms. Besides header tags, you can use other text-modifying tags to place emphasis on certain keywords, phrases, or blocks of text.These tags included with WordPress are as follows: <B> which will give you the <strong> tag if you look in the HTML version of your Edit box, <I> which will show as the <em> tag in the HTML version, and the <U> that will show as <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Underlined Word</span>.
Each tag will also have the closing tag directly after the emphasized word as shown in the examples below. These examples are what the finished word(s) will look like in the HTML Edit Post box:
- <strong>Bold</strong>
- <em>Italicized</em>
- <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Underlined</span>
Optimizing the Alt Image Tags
Because search engines cannot accurately read images, you will need to explicitly tell the search engines what your images are about. Although images are not necessarily search-engine friendly, they are a vital part of visitor-friendly design. A vibrant, colorful, image-based web site compels its visitors to stay longer and browse more pages.As a general rule you should limit the use of images on your web page; if you can say what you want to with text, you should. However, if you use images, you should also use Alt Image Tags.
The Alt image tag is a textual replacement for an image. If for any reason an image cannot be displayed, the Alt image text appears in its place. Rather than just fill your Alt image tags with lists of keywords or phrases, take the time to write a unique relevant, if possible keyword-based, description of the image being described.
Abuse of these tags can lead to a rankings penalty, so be careful when writing your descriptions. Do not repeat the same words over and over again, and never repeat the same Alt image tag more than once unless the image itself is repeated. The search engines read Alt image tags and take that text into consideration when ranking pages, but Alt image text is not an equal substitute for actual text included within the body of the page.
5 - will be covering every aspect of structuring your content properly for people and search engines alike; the lesson will include proper keyword density and the proper writing length for article submission.
– You will be shown the importance of writing compelling headlines to writing in an original voice; a complete keyword-enriched web site makeover if you choose, plus the necessity of pinging your blog for updated content.
Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)
The Title Tag article mentioned from above: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/title-tags-seo-tips/SEOCentro.com Meta Analyzer Tool http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
Here’s the link for the WordPress All in One SEO Pack plug-in http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
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