Archive for July, 2010

Note: there should be close collaboration between the copy writer and the person who uploads the new content to the website to make best use of these tips.

Choosing your file name and location

When adding content onto your website, consider the use of keywords in the file names and folder names. A search engine may judge a site to be more relevant than another if it uses the search phrase in the file name – e.g. car-insurance/simple-cover.html

Where you are using separate words (e.g. car insurance), words should be spaced using hyphens as opposed to underscores. Hyphens are more readable to users, and search engines also prefer them.

Document and folder names should be NO MORE than 25 characters, ideally less than 15.

Title Tags – the Basics

If you need to write the title tag of the page, there are several rules of thumb to remember. Title tags not only appear as the title of the page in your browser, they are also usually used as the link text in the search engine results.

• Use your most important, Priority 1 keywords at the start of the tag.
• If you HAVE to use the brand name (which is usually unnecessary if it is contained in your URL), use it towards the end of the tag.
• Use no more than 10-15 words, and do not exceed 80 characters as most search engines and browsers will abridge your text at this point.

Meta Tags – The Basics

There’s an interesting article here on using meta keywords tag:

http://www.apogee-web-consulting.com/sem_articles/meta_keywords.html

Apparently Google have not used the meta keywords tag for quite a while so our advice is to avoid using them; however a lot of sites do still use them so it can be handy to check out your competitor sites to get ideas for your own SEO project!

Meta data

The following are some rules of thumb for the two main types of Meta data

Descriptions

• Write a unique description for each page, making sure it reflects what‘s on the page.
• It should not just be a copy of the Title tag, and should not simply be a block of text copied from the body of the text.
• It should contain no more than 30 words / 200 characters. All the important information should be presented early, in case of abridging.
• It should be readable as well as optimised – your description tag will usually appear under your page title in the search engine results, so needs to attract people to click on your listing just as much as your branding will.

Keywords

• Include Priority 1, 2 and 3 keywords. Never repeat any individual words more than 3 times, even when used in several key phrases.
• Use no more than 30 keywords, as more than this will affect your keyword density.