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What are the search engines looking at?

What parts of your website pages are search engines looking at?

Search engines are programmed to give people links to sites that most match their search words and phrases. While we don’t want you to “stuff your page” with keywords, we do think it’s good to be mindful of these when writing the copy for your site. Incorporate them where it’s natural and reads well. Create pages about one particular topic – your aim should be that for people looking for that topic, your page would be the perfect answer for them.

There are also some “hidden” areas you need to be aware of, when creating your website. Check about these on your current site, how are things looking now?

Title

The words put into the title tag are actually visible on top the of the page in the tab. You may never have noticed this, but since it’s something people can see, it’s important to include the company name, tagline, and something about the page you are on. The purpose of these is to tell people what the page is about. Ideally, some keywords and keyphrases should be used here too. Best to limit this to 70 characters, and this includes spaces. After this, keyword relevance value drops significantly. Also, only a certain number of characters are visible, so best keep it to what can be read by humans.

Meta description

This is what Google usually uses when displaying search results, so it’s worth putting some effort into constructing the sentences. Make sure this is a good summary, with keywords and phrases where logical.
NOTE: The Title & Description appear in the Google search listing results.

Page headings

Headings and subheadings in your pages break up the text and allow the page to be scannable. Using the correct HTML tags for headings (H1, H2, and H3) means they show up in the pre-defined sizes for that design, and also are scanned by search engines to give more information on what the page is all about. So consider these too when writing and formatting your pages.

Content

Of course we want to make sure the content of your page is well written, convincing, with a tone of voice that matches your brand, and peppered with a responsible amount of keywords and phrases.
Hopefully this will help you understand the little bitty details that all add up – lots of people know this, but lots dont, so your efforts should see some results. If you need help, get in touch – our SEO guy Tom is amazing and can help guide you!
NOTE: When relaunching your website, it’s extremely important to replicate the browser title, meta description, page headings and main content as closely as possible, particularly for pages currently being listed on Google, which send a lot of visits via the SEO search results. See our post about keeping rankings while launching a new site.
The number of keyword mentions on different web pages can be tailored according to the goal of the page, for example:
Electrician: Most people searching for a local electrician will be concerned about the locations served, availability, testimonials, call out charge & hourly rate, as opposed to reading the content in depth.
Therefore these key selling points can be highlighted as headings and bullet points to entice quick enquiries and the main content can have extra SEO keywords to boost the SEO rank.
E Commerce store: The product pictures, availability, sizes, specifications and prices of the products are the key selling points. The product descriptions can therefore contain extra SEO keywords to boost the SEO rank.
We can always advise on these elements when working on projects!

If you are interested in reading more SEO related posts, check out our SEO post archives.

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