Quick and Easy Way to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
You probably know that there is an on-site and off-site optimization. The off-site optimization is about link building. The on-site optimization is about creating a good quality content with your best keywords dispersed on the page. While creating a good content may take days and weeks, there is a thing you can do right away to improve your search engine ranking.
I'm talking about the meta tags of the web page such as Title and meta Description. The Title tag has been the simplest yet one of the most important on-site optimization components for the latest years. And even at present you can have an improvement in SE ranking by optimizing your page meta Title.
The secret is to place your primary keywords as close as possible to the beginning of the Title tag. It's important that each page of your website has a unique meta Title because you don't want to have issues with duplicate content. By the way, the keyword stuffed Title tag is a great way to show the difference between similar web pages.
Here is an example of a good Title tag:
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<title>Create and Send that killer HTML Email Newsletter with G-Lock EasyMail</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
The keywords the user types in the search engine are highlighted by bold in the search results. And the meta Title tag which exactly matches the search query tends to be on the higher positions in search results and thus, will have a higher click-through rate.
While inbound links with your keywords in the anchor text are probably considered as a more important ranking factor, the bad thing is that you have less control over somebody else's website linking to you. On your web site you're a master of the situation and should not miss this simple opportunity to rank well in search results for your targeted keywords.
The most important thing to remember is that if a good meta Title tag can help your web page ranking a little, a bad Title can bring to nothing the web page's chances of ranking well in the search engine results. So, if you feel your meta Titles are not good enough and can be improved, don't wait too long and edit them right away. Simply by including a well compiled meta Title tag into the page source, you can jump a few positions up in the search results.
Along with the meta Title tag the meta Description is a another important ranking factor of an on-site optimization. While the Title tag stands as the main headline of your site in the search results, the meta Description presents the summary of your web page to the user viewing the search results.
An accurate and relevant to the page content meta Description wins the prospective visitor's favour and makes them click on the link.
<meta name="description" content="With brilliant designs and powerful features of G-Lock EasyMail you can bring spectacular results to your email marketing campaigns and beat your competitors in the business" />
Here is how the meta Title and meta Description are shown in the search results:
If you do not include the meta description in the HTML source of your web page, the search engines will add the description on their own by taking any snippet from your page content.
Would you like users to see the description for your web page as below?
Title: Create and Send that killer HTML Email Newsletter with G-Lock EasyMail
Summary: Home, Downloads, Buy Now, Support, Tutorials
I'm sure I wouldn't want the search engine to just repeat the navigation links in my site description. And this is more likely to happen if you fail to include a well written, relevant to the page content meta description.
Don't rely upon the search engines to choose the right description for your web page and take time to include the meta Descriptions yourself on every page of your web site to entice prospective visitors to click on your site listings.
A simple way to learn how to write good descriptions is to read ppc ads related to your market niche. Then you can compose your own meta Description in a similar manner if appropriate. Like a good copy of a ppc ad, a good meta Description copy containing keywords will increase your click through rate and will also help your web site rankings because Google will consider it to be more relevant to the search query. But unlike the ppc you don't have to pay any fee for organic search results. A well written description will naturally attract visitors and bring you a higher CTR.
If you use WordPress as your blog platform, the plugin called All in One SEO pack will automatically optimize your titles for search engines and generate the description from the first 25 words (or more) of your post. This plugin is a must for anyone who uses WordPress.
The bottom line: the meta Title and Description are still important factors of the on-site optimization and should be used on each page of the web site you want to be described in search results. If you cannot afford much time for SEO, the first thing you should think about is creating good meta Title and Description for your web page. This is your number one task. They will work for the benefit of your site while you can engage into other SEO tactics.
Please, share your thoughts in comments.
Tags: anchor text, content type, description meta tags, inbound links, meta description, quality content, search engine ranking, search query, site optimization