A couple of weeks ago we promised to provide you with our top tips for on-page search engine optimization. Well here at Smart SEO we keep our promises, so here is the second of three posts providing details on how to create your site to maximize its SEO potential.
If you missed the first installment, here’s a link – INCLUDE LINK TO PREVIOUS – we’re only giving you six tips so you might as well read them all! Otherwise here are our number’s three and four.
- Description Meta Tag Description meta tags are, in the main, intended for the human user, rather than for the search engines. This feature is used to describe the purpose of the page and will, more often than not, be displayed in the search listings, so make it good.Description Meta Tags used to be a more important element of the ranking algorithm but they have become less significant in this regard over recent years. Still, this is how you are describing your website to the world so make the description short and snappy (no more than around150 characters or you risk truncation with some websites), use your main keywords upfront and remember that this description may be the deciding factor between someone choosing to click through to your site or the one below it, so sell, sell, sell.
- Maximum length of the description meta tag varies from one search engine to another. Google will show 154 characters, including spaces, but there are other engines that will show less so it is best to be as succinct as possible (though dropping below 50 characters will do you no favours either.
- Try not to use words that do not appear on the main page because words that the engines consider to be irrelevant can trigger spam filters
- Phrase Elements Phrase elements should be used within the main body of the page but used sparingly. The semantical tags <STRONG> and <EM> can be used for targeting keywords on the page, as alternatives to the tags <I> and <B> which are used for visual purposes.