In this post we will discuss many topics with regards to ‘The Head Section’ of your page and how each element can affect your overall SEO efforts.
When You Design A SEO- Friendly Web Page…
< HEAD > < / HEAD > is the important optimization section that you cannot miss. section contains valuable SEO information such as the tag, Meta Descriptions and other tags I will discuss below. Right now, we will show you how to write the correct section to improve search engine ranking of your page.
1) Document Type Definitions (DTDs) Statement.
In order for your website to validate with the W3C, a properly formatted DOCTYPE is required at the very top of your HTML, before the HTML tag. As Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results, correct DTDs statement is more important. Having this valid tag in place not only allows your site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows for faster indexing.
2) The Title Tag.
Title tag is one of the major factors which will affect page’s rankings. You should add important keywords and keyword phrases to the title of your page. In addition, title should be informative and readable. When Google shows 69 characters, including spaces for page’s title, don’t exceed more than this number.
Hot Tip: Having duplicated Titles tag across a site has been shown to have the same effect as duplicate content, thus harming a site’s ranking power.
3) Meta Description Tag.
Description tags serve a double purpose. First, they’re one of the first places a search engine looks for keywords, so of course it’s important that you have your most important keywords there. It should be short; lengths vary, but fewer than 200 characters is generally a good bet. Second, a concise, well-written description on search engine results page (SERP) can attract visitors to your site.
4) Meta Keyword Tag.
Google still ignores this tag. Use 6-8 keyword phrases in the Meta Keyword Tag; however, leave all of your “money phrases” (highest converting phrases) out, since the Keyword Tag is the first place competitors will often look to steal information.
Hot Tip: If you don’t use this tag, there is no change in ranking.
5) Meta Robots Tag.
The Meta Robots tag allows you to control whether or not you want the page to be indexed by search engines. By default, search engine spiders (crawlers) will try to index every page and follow links from one page to the next. The best use of the Meta robots tag is when you want to keep the search engine spiders OUT and not let them index a page.
Examples of proper formatting are…
1. <meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>
2. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>
3. <meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow”>
4. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
6) Meta Author Tag.
This is an area for the author to place their name. The Author Meta Tag is required to meet Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) validation. It does nothing for SEO or usability, but I highly recommend you use it on at least your home page.
7) Meta Image Toolbar.
This is not a widely used Meta Tag and it isn’t required. This tag is useful if you have larger images. It will remove the “context icons” that appear in IE so your site looks cleaner. I recommend using this tag if you have images that are greater than 100 pixels in height or width.
Many people might remember the famous “Florida Update” in 2003, during the Holiday season Google changed it’s search algorithm which cause a huge dispute amongst webmasters. Many websites lost their traffic ranking just before… [
