Think of the title and description of your website as your first impression with search engines. Many people don’t realize that the text you place in this important web real estate appears in front of your potential clients when they see your website listing on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the minor search engines.

Just like internet users, the Googlebot has a short attention span. Getting exposure in the organic search results requires telling Google, right up front what subject a website covers, utilizing properly formatted text in the *head* section of your website. To ensure full Google compliance sitemaps and robots file must also be submitted and formatted correctly.

Basics of on page Search Engine Optimization

Title Tag

The title of a website. The title’s importance lies in the fact that Google uses the text you place here as an important part of where your website will appear in Google search. Your title tag is also displayed on the first page of Google when your listing is displayed organically. Including target keywords right up front in the title tag of a webpage, is a simple effective step to improve your site’s relevancy to your target keywords

For Google advertisers title tags are even more important. It is possible to obtain higher positioning with lower per click costs if one’s title tags are more relevant than those of his competitors. SSSSHHH don’t tell my competitors, they still think it’s an auction.

Meta Description

This information appears on the first page of Google when your website appears as a result of a users search query. Having the correct terms, in the correct format in your Meta Keywords file will increase both relevancy and click-through in organic search. Keywords are important, but really good meta descriptions also spark interest and inspire action by users. Your meta description should convey your value proposition quickly.

Meta Keywords

The poor meta keywords tag is historically the most abused of the meta tags. Since so many webmasters manipulated the meta keywords tag in order to mislead Google users, Google no longer assigns value to, or even bothers to read the meta keywords file. If the on page content includes all of your important keywords, writing a meta keywords file is unnecessary for Google ranking. Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, Dogpile and others do read, and assign at least a smidge of value to the meta keywords file. Including exact matches to your most important keywords in a page’s meta keywords file, will help that page of your website rank higher in organic search, on the minor search engines.

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing follow the links to our other resources.

Search Engine Optimization

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