As many of you already know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  It is comprised of several techniques to position your website for the best possible ranking on search engines.  Obviously, the goal is to rank well in Google, which is the standard in the search world.  Implementing good use of SEO, however, will yield rewards on the other major search engines as well. 

SEO can be divided into two parts: (1) on-site SEO and (2) off-site SEO.  On-site SEO refers to things you can do on your own website to help improve your search ranking.  Off-site SEO refers primarily to backlinking, which is other sites that link to the content on your website.

In this and the next couple posts, we’ll focus on on-site SEO.  Periodically, I’m going to talk about how to do certain things in WordPress.  These techniques can be applied to any website, whether it’s running on WordPress or not.  However, since most of you use WordPress, that is what I’ll focus on.

For our discussion today, let’s talk about

1. Keywords
2. Your URL
3. Titles
4. Meta Descriptions
5. Meta Keywords

Keywords

This is a quick and dirty summary of what keywords are and why they’re important.  I’ll give you a much more in-depth discussion in a later article.  For now, keywords essentially refer to the search terms people are likely to type into a search engine to find your site.  For your site as a whole, there may be several keywords or key phrases you want to rank for.  You may also have certain pages on your site that are dedicated to ranking for particular keywords.

On my site, for example (www.goldensitedesign.com), the keywords that are important to me are “Free Custom WordPress Site Design.”  That phrase, or combinations thereof, yield the most relevant visitors to my site.  How well you rank for any given keyword or phrase depends on how much competition there is for the same keywords.  The more specific you are, usually the less competition there will be.  But you have to balance that with what people are actually searching for.

If your site is dedicated to cooking and recipes, there will likely be thousands of sites trying to rank for the generic keywords “cooking” or “recipes.”  If you narrow your focus to something like “Southern Cooking”  or “Creole Cooking,” you will have a better chance of higher ranking.

So, armed with this general knowledge of keywords, what do you do with them?  Read on.

Your URL

The first place to include keywords is in your URL.  Now, if don’t already have a domain name, and you’re trying to come up with something, consider what keywords will be important to your site.  If your site will be about teaching people to live debt free, consider using “debtfree” as part of your domain name.

That said, I don’t recommend sacrificing branding for keyword placement.  So, if you already have a name for your business and you plan on building a brand around that name, then use that in your domain.  There are other uses for keywords that will help you rank well in search engines.  Take a look at all the popular sites whose names have little to do with keywords that are relevant to their businesses.  Take a site like Mint.com.  The site is dedicated to helping people manage their finances.  Although “mint” is sort of tangentially related to what they do, you would type “mint” into a search engine when looking for help managing your personal finances.

Another way to get keywords into your URL, whether or not they’re in your domain, is to add pages to your site and use keywords in the URL for the page.  So, a site like Mint.com might have a page called, “Financial Planning Software,” and the URL to the site is www.mint.com/financial-planning-software.  This is why it helps to have a blog as part of your site.  It allows you to write articles dedicated to specific keywords that you can use in the URL.

Be careful, however, not to engage in keyword stuffing.  What I mean by that is including every variation of a keyword in your URL.  Google sees that as a spamming tactic, and you will be penalized for it.

Titles

The next place to include your keywords, and this is the most important place, is in your page title.  What am I talking about?  I’m not talking about the header of a page on your site.  I’m talking about the title at the top of your web browser window.  For example, if you go to my site (www.goldensitedesign.com) and look at the text at the top of your window or the tab my site is in (depending on your browser), you’ll see it says, “Free Custom WordPress Web Site Design.”  That’s the title meta tag.

Google and other search engines look to page titles first when they go out crawling the web.  When you do a search, the title is what comes up in the results as the link to your site.  So, it’s critical that you include relevant keywords in the title of your home page and in each other page on your site.  Here’s what it looks like on Google:

There are a few ways to set your title.  If you’re using WordPress, it’s relatively easy.  If you’re using either the Thesis theme framework or the Genesis framework from StudioPress, this ability is built into your theme.

In Thesis, to set the title of your homepage, go to Site Options under the Thesis section.  Expand the Home Page SEO options, and write in the title for home page <title> tag.

In Genesis, go to the Genesis menu, and click on the SEO Settings.  You’ll enter your homepage title under Homepage Settings, Home Doctitle.

If you’re not using Thesis or Genesis but are still using WordPress, I recommend installing the All-In-One SEO plugin.  It’s free and can accomplish similar SEO tasks.  There is a section in the settings for you to enter the home page title.

Regardless of the theme you’re using, when you create a new page or post in WordPress the default title will be whatever you’ve named that page or post.  You can change that, however, in the settings on the page or post.  In Thesis it looks like this:

If you’re not using WordPress, and you need to enter the code manually, it will very generally look like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your Title Here</title>
</head>

<body>
…

</body>
</html>

Remember, the titles on your site are the most important pieces of information for ranking well on search engines, so don’t neglect them.  You want to keep the title short and key-word relevant.  You may also want to include your site’s name in the title of your homepage.  This is useful if someone is bookmarking your site because the page title is what the default bookmark name is for most web browsers.  However, if your site name already includes your relevant keywords, don’t double up on keywords in your title.  That’s another form of keyword stuffing and could lower your ranking.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are what appear in the search engine results after the link to your site.

Meta descriptions aren’t visible on your actual site.  It provides another opportunity to include relevant keywords and also to entice people to visit your site.  If you don’t set the meta description for a particular page on your site and it comes up in a search engine, the search engine will pull content from that page to fill in the description under the link.  Usually, it’ll pull whatever content contains the keywords that were searched for.

Why would you want to set the meta descriptions if the search engines will fill it in anyway?  Think of it this way: the description gives you another opportunity to market your site and entice someone to click on the link to your site.  Clear calls to action containing the relevant keywords can be much more effective at getting someone to click your link than a disjointed sentence with the keywords.

To set the meta description for your homepage and you’re using Thesis or Genesis for WordPress, it’s in the same location as the title setting.  If your theme doesn’t have that option, the All-In-One SEO plugin has a place for it.

In WordPress, to set the description for a particular page or post, there is typically a space for that under the box where you enter the content for that particular page or post.

Alternatively, if you want to put the info in by hand, you would do it like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your Title Here</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your description goes here.”>
</head>

<body>
…
</body>
</html>

Meta Keywords

I won’t spend a lot of time on meta keywords because the conventional wisdom is that search engines do not look at them anymore when indexing sites.  In fact, Google has come out and said it doesn’t consider meta keywords.  But, at the same time, they don’t hurt, and search engines change their algorithms periodically, so you never know when they might be relevant again.

Meta keywords are a list of relevant keywords separated by commas.  For WordPress users, there is a place to enter meta keywords in the same places you find the title and meta description settings.

To enter them manually, do the following:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your Title Here</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your description goes here.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3″>
</head>

<body>
…
</body>
</html>

What Next?

Put it into practice.  If you implement the above suggestions, you’ll be off to a great start.  If I designed your site, most everything I’ve discussed is already in place.  In the next couple articles, we’ll build on the foundation we’ve laid here with more on-site SEO techniques.  Remember, it can take from several days to several weeks for changes to show up on search engines.  It all depends on when their crawlers get to your site.  In a later article, I’ll show you how to monitor this process in Google.  If you have questions, please leave them in the comments below.