Ultimate SEO Experts Guide

With all of the accoutrements and flair that can be considered “SEO” these days, where does a beginner begin? There are bare bones to SEO without which any website optimization would fail. You can make many mistakes, or miss many optimization opportunities and still rank OK, but without the vitals, you won’t even place.

Page title: Your home page and all interior pages MUST have a title. That is the end-all, be-all for good SEO form according to Moz and other delegates. For best results, your title will include whichever keyword you’ve decided to go after. There are good and bad areas of a title in which to place your keywords. Some SEO agencies will purport matching your keyword exactly, while others recommend using variants. This is definitely a science and its arguable that there are no wrong answers with placement and design of keywords. However, no title is NOT acceptable.

Meta descriptions: The need for meta descriptions on every page of your site is much more of a debate than the need for titles. However, there is a better and a less-preferred way to manage your descriptions. If you do not enter a description yourself, one will be provided for you. You can’t guarantee this will be the description you want people to read, the one that will make them click through and check out your site. If you use descriptions, know that there are best-practice formulas in order to ensure proper keyword use. If you don’t, understand that the description that will appear will be pulled from your page content and may not drive traffic.

Content Length: Pages that are too short won’t be given a lot of authority to search bots or to your visitors. You want your site to appear well-crafted and represent your brand. You also need your site to appear managed and populated in order to rank well and avoid penalties. However, pages that are excessively long – in the thousands – run the risk of being considered “spammy” and will also be completely passed over by your readers. You should make sure that you content is kept at a reasonable, readable length. To help readers and crawlers alike, format your content so that it can be skimmed. Use boldface and bullets, as demonstrated here, to help the eye travel down the page and call out specific portions of your content.

Keywords: The first step to properly utilizing keywords on your website is to choose the proper words. There are ways to determine this and analytics to consider and employ when doing so. Once proper keywords are chosen for your site, it is important to use them enough, but not too much, and in the right places. This might seem like a complete mystery but experts in the field have been crafting the exact formulas and tracking what works (and what absolutely doesn’t) for years as the SEO concept has evolved.

In short, these are a few of the cornerstones of SEO, but for a composite understanding of the craft, you need to study it at length and keep up with the trends and algorithms that change daily. If this seems timely, it is because it IS. Trust an expert who is well-versed and knows just how to dominate the SERPs.