First thing to look at is the metadata. This is data that is read by the search engines – if you don’t know how to change it you’ll need to ask your web developer.
First thing to change is the meta title – the title that appears right at the top of the screen. On our homepage it’s:
‘Web Design Cambridge | SEO Friendly Web Design for Cambridge SMEs.’
Now if you’ve read the keyword analysis part of this blog you’ll know one of our keywords is: ‘Web Design Cambridge’. In the title I’ve slipped in the keywords directly and indirectly. Do remember that the page title will be seen by people searching Google so it needs to make sense to a human too.
Google will crop your title after 66 characters whereas Yahoo won’t crop the title until it reaches 120 characters – aim to get a readable keyword title in 66 characters and than add the additional characters in for Yahoo. To be honest we aim most of our optimisation at Google so have left it at 66 characters.
The next thing is the meta description – the description that appears under the page title in a Google search. For our homepage it is:
‘SWAYsearch web design, Cambridge, specialise in great looking search engine friendly web design for small and medium Cambridge businesses.’
Whilst officially the meta description isn’t used by Google to rank websites why take the chance? We use our main keywords and make sure that they read well to the human eye. It’s one thing to come up top in Google but if nobody clicks your link it really won’t help. Try to make you meta description around 150 - 160 characters long.
Third piece of meta data to change are the meta keywords. These were once the key to being found in the search engines (back in the pre-Google days of AltaVista and Lycos et all) but these days don’t really hold any value at all. That’s not to say don’t add them – you certainly won’t be penalised for meta keywords – but don’t stress over them. Basically just add in the keywords you want to be found in the search engines for.
That’s the initial part of optimising your metadata, next we move onto the body copy.
Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation by SWAYsearch