Just how important are the right on-page SEO techniques?
Consider them to be like the foundation of a house. After all, you can’t move in all of your furniture and put artwork up on the walls if your home doesn’t have a solid foundation to start with. And, you can’t have a successful off-page SEO strategy without the right foundation on each of your pages.
While you may have heard about countless on-page SEO techniques, there are 3 that you need to be taking advantage of right now:
1. Your meta tags
They may not look exciting – after all, most of them are just source code that most people never see – but meta tags are the most important of all your on-page SEO techniques.
Why?
When the search engine spiders crawl your website, they have no idea what it’s actually about. The only way they can tell what your site is about is to read your meta tags. If they’re not optimized properly – or, worse, not optimized at all – the spiders will be confused. And if the spiders don’t know what you’re all about, they won’t know where to rank you – and you’ll wind up being non-existent in the search engine results.
Luckily, if your meta tags aren’t up to par, they’re easy to fix. You can make everything better with just a quick trip into your website’s source code.
2. Your title tags
Your title tags is the most important meta tags on your website because both humans and search engine spiders see them. In fact, your title tags are usually the very first thing that people and spiders see!
Title tags have existed since the earliest versions of HTML, and search engines still rely on them today. The title tag appears above your site’s description in the search results as a clickable hyperlink. You can include 60 characters in the title tag – if they are longer than this the search engine will truncate the title, and show an ellipsis at the end to indicate that the full title is not being shown.
You need to create your title tags carefully. Most of the time, your title tag is going to be the clickable part of your search engine results listing, so you will need to fit your main keywords in it (again, so that the spiders know exactly what your page is about) – while also coming up with a title tag that’s interesting enough for actual humans to click on.
It can be difficult to fit all of that into 60 characters, but with practice you will learn to make short, punchy and eye-catching headlines. It is worth taking the time to make your headlines as appealing as possible because they are the first thing that people see in the SERPs. A good headline will dramatically improve your CTR.
3. Your description tags
This is usually what’s used as the little summary displayed in the search engine results, so, again, you’ll have to come up with something that’s catchy to both humans and spiders.
However, this on-page SEO technique is a little tricky, because the search engines aren’t required to use your description tags in their results. Many times, they pick other snippets of your text to use as that little summary. That’s not a good thing, though, because you may wind up with incomplete sentences or sentences that aren’t catchy enough to attract clicks.
TOP TIP – HOW TO CREATE A GREAT DESCRIPTION
Did you know that the page description does not have anything to do with rankings or SEO – it is purely for the user?
This means you need to think of what you want displayed and make sure it is catchy but most of all readable. Most people simply slap the keyword in the description, after all the person searching will see the keyword they just search for in your description and will probably click on it to find out more.
But if this does not look natural, or make sense it will just be awkward and skipped over.
Do you want to know a great secret on how to really create a great looking description, one that has already been proven to work?
Go to Google and search for the keyword your article is about
Don’t look at the other sites already listed, but look at the PPC advertisers.
The top PPC Advertisers spend a boat load of money and the best ones continually split test their copy to make sure it works.
Look at the top few advertisers and combine them to make a killer description that you know works.
You will be surprised how many people skip over the importance of the description field, most look so bad that no one clicks them. After all a top ranking page link is pointless unless you entice people to click on it..
Importance of Meta Keywords
10 years ago they may have been highly relevant – however after people used them to stuff hundreds of spammy keywords in there, the search engines stopped using them…
Google decided to stop using them way back in September 2009.
TIME SAVING TIP
Skip the keyword meta tag as Google and almost every other search engine does not use them.
If you have a page that you spent loads of time cramming every keyword you could think of – go remove them – it may be harming your sites rankings
Dont beleive us, check out these videos from the Web Spam Team at Google
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU
Another good video about meta tags in general