Truth: “words” drive search results.

  1. Keyword Research is perhaps the most important activity that you can undertake to set the stage for all of the other work that you need to do.
    1. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool
  2. Competitive Authority – When kicking off a search engine optimization effort, you should get a sense of where you stand in terms of authority and content.
    1. One tool that can help you determine relative authority is OpenSiteExplorer.
    2. Then, you can use Bing.com to check a website’s indexation (how many pages they have indexed in the search engines) by doing a “site:www.sitename.com” search.
  3. Metatags – HTML meta tags are officially page data tags that lie between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document.
    1. Title Tags – Although the title tag appears in the head block of the page, it isn’t actually a meta tag. What’s the difference? The title tag is a required page “element” according to the W3C. Meta tags are optional page descriptors.
      1. Title tags are the boldest element of the search result, it forms the major part of the decision-making process, and searcher may or may not click on the result.
      2. From the SEO point of view, the title tag should have all keywords that rank well. The most important keyword should be at beginning and should be followed by a second largest brand name. You should remember to write keywords for human beings. It should be formatted to some degree for search engine, and it is important for tags to make perfect sense to people.
      3. The title tag should be written differently for each page. Do not mass replicate your title tag as it would have a negative effect on search visibility.
    2. Description –  tells the search engine what your page or site is about. Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces). However, check the search engine results page (SERP) of choice to confirm this.
    3. Keywords – The only search engine that looks at the keywords anymore is Microsoft’s Bing – and they use it to help detect spam. To avoid hurting your site, your best option is to never add this tag.

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