There are literally hundreds of different techniques that can contribute to an SEO strategy. Content creation, keyword targeting, link building, usability etc. Starting with the basics is always the best idea but what happens when you’ve got a pretty good grasp on those and you’re still not seeing the results you want?
That’s when you need to start looking at the technical bits of SEO. The bits that you might need a programmer to help you set up so you’ve never bothered trying before, or the bits that you didn’t think were that important because they’re not discussed as much as others.
Its never a good idea to just play around with bits of your code and hope you’ve done the right thing, so I’ve put together this ‘Resource Page’ with a bunch of Quick Guides that will (hopefully) get you on your way to understanding and implementing the more technical bits of SEO.
Quick Guides: The Canonical Tag
Quick Guides: The rel=”NoFollow” attribute
Quick Guides: Page Titles & H1 Tags
Quick Guides: The Meta Description Tag
Enjoy and please let me know if any of these guides have helped you out. Share your SEO stories with us, we love to hear them!
What are Page Titles and H1 Tags?
Page Titles are HTML tags that can be assigned to a sentence of text that defines the content on the page; the page title. Search engines look at them as a short description or introduction to a page in order to determine its content/theme.
H(x) tags can also be seen as a kind of page title as they are used to add a header to specific bits of content within a given page.
How are Page Titles and H1 Tags used?
Page Titles appear in search engines, in a browsers title bar, in a pages source code, and also shows in snippets when the link to a page is pasted into elements like comment boxes.
The use of the numbers in H tags, H1, H2, H3 etc. represent the hierarchy or importance of information on that page. So the H1 tag would represent the most important section of the page, H2 the second most, H3 the third etc.
What do Page Titles and H1 Tags look like?
Page Titles aren’t visibly present on a page; they simply rest in the pages source code so they can be accessed by search engines.
Page Title code looks like this:
<head>
<title>Online Advertising Blog – Serchen Interactive</title>
</head>
Page Titles will appear in search engines like this:
On this page, the ‘Our Blog’ text at the top is a H1 tag, the title of the post is a H2 tag and the title of this paragraph “What do Page Titles and H1 Tags look like?” is an example of a H3 tag. They can differ in formatting but are usually bolded and are often underlined.
The H3 looks like this (excluding colour formatting):
<h3> What do Page Titles and H1 Tags look like? </h3>
How do Search Engines look at Page Titles and H1 Tags?
Page Titles are an important factor that every search engine takes in account when determining the ranking of a page in SERPs.
Search engines will look at Page Titles for keywords to determine the relevance of the page to the given search query, so it’s vital to make sure your Page Titles are accurate and relevant to the page.
H1, H2, & H3 tags are also seen by search engines and its thought that they show a slight preference to keywords displayed within these tags, which again means you need to make sure these are relevant.
How long should Page Titles and H1 Tags be?
With most search engines, 70 characters including spaces seems to be the maximum limit for Page Titles, Any longer will results in the title getting cut off in SERPs which can ruin the image of your appearance.
As H(x) tags are just text within a page there is no limit on how long they should be. Although, as they’re still titles its best to keep them shorter (roughly the same as Page Titles) as it just looks better and keeps your page neater. Of course, this is completely up to you.
See also: Quick Guides: The Meta Description Tag
What is the Meta Description Tag?
The meta description tag is a HTML attribute that can be individually assigned to each page on a website.
They are readable by search engines and displayed in SERPs (search engine results pages) as snippets to describe the content or theme of that particular web page.
How is the Meta Description Tag used?
The meta description tag is used to describe the content or theme of a page, as mentioned above.
The best way to view the meta description tag is as a sort of free advertisement when you happen to appear in SERPs. Although it isn’t crawled for keywords, any words in you description that match the search query you are appearing for will be bolded, indicating the relevance of your page to the query.
For this reason, it is handy to accurately describe your page with appropriate keywords that are relevant to your industry. Of course, do not keyword stuff your meta description as it will do nothing for you except highlight to the audience that you are spamming.
What does the Meta Description Tag look like?
Here is an example of the HMTL code used for writing meta description tags:
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”This is the text that will show up in SERPs. You can put anything you like here, but keep it relevant. ”
</head>
Here’s what our meta description for the Serchen.com homepage looks like in Google (it’s 150 characters including spaces):
How do search engines look at the Meta Description Tag?
Search engines do not take into account any keywords in your meta description, so including them for reasons other than accurately describing the page, is pointless.
It’s important to note that search engines will not always use the meta description as the snippet in SERPs. If a different piece of text from your website is more related to the search query, that text may be used in place of the meta description.
If you see this happening it could be a sign that your meta description is not specific or relevant enough to the page and you can consider changing it, although this is not necessary if you don’t see it as a problem.
Also try and avoid using symbols and non-alpha/numeric as search engines, Google in particular, has been known to ignore things like quotation marks.
How long should the Meta Description Tag be?
There is no strict character limit for a meta description tag, however, the ideal length of them is determined by each individual search engine. If a search engine uses your meta description and it’s too long it will cut off the excess words with an ellipsis (…). To avoid this happening, the following lengths (including spaces) are recommended:
Google – Around 150 – 160 characters (Thought to be 156)
Bing – Between 25 and 150 characters
Yahoo! – 161 characters maximum
See also: Quick Guides: Page Titles & H1 Tags
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