SEO for Small Business - Make Your Website Work!  White Hat SEO Techniques and Methods Revealed

Comprehensive guide to Organic, Natural, Search Engine Optimization. Page 3

SEO Tutorial page 3 continued from page 2

The description meta tag is possibly the second most important element on the page.

Google often uses the meta description to display under the title on the search results page. The description is where you can really go to town providing an accurate description of the content of your web page for your small business.

Assuming the title was enough to get the searcher to read the description, this is your chance to get them to visit your site. Make it accurately describe the content and at the same time make it alluring to the searcher. Keep in mind, for this to work you have to have some decent content to work with.

A good description to go with the elephant stock photo page previously mentioned would be something like:

 “Stock photo of a woman ridding on the back of an African elephant in an Ecuadorian Jungle.  For hundreds of unique stock photos of elephants, jungles, and lifestyle pictures visit John Lund Photography”

The main keywords from the title are in the description, more details about the content are present, and the potential long tailed keyword phrases has been increased because of the association between words in the description.

By telling the searcher there are many more photos he might be interested in, you improve the chances he will click through to your site. You can also mention the location and name of your small business here.

The keyword meta tag…not very important but use it correctly anyway

The major search engines quit using the keyword tag long ago due to spamming, but some of the smaller engines may still use it.  I use it because I think it’s possible that Google checks to see if it is being used correctly, and may give you brownie points if so.

If you are abusing it I’m sure that Google takes note. Put 4 to 8 keyword phrases in the tag, and use words that do appear in the body text some where.

Other meta-tags for cache and indexing control

These meta-tags can be added to your head section to ensure your most current content is what gets displayed:

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

These meta-tags prevent ODP information being used in search engine page returns.
<meta name="robots" content="noodp">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

If you have any pages that you don’t want to be indexed, you can block them from the search engines <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

 If you want the search engines not to follow links on that page, then write:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex nofollow" />

Canonicalization is critically important

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices. Technically these urls are different:

www.johnlund.com, johnlund.com/ and  www.johnlund.com/default.html

You need to have a single, official url for your site.

For example, if I put in just http://johnlund.com in the top browser bar, I cannot access it as a separate url. It automatically fills in the www and goes to http://www.johnlund.com.

If you could type in the non-www version and it doesn’t change, and then you type in the www version and it doesn’t change either then you have a problem that needs to be addressed.

Why does this matter? Your inbound links are being split between two sites and so they are greatly diluted. The importance of 100 links is way more than double that of 50 links.

You can use a 301 re-direct or ask your hosting service to correct this for you. If you have joined Google’s webmaster tools, they have a box in the settings that you can use to choose which version should be used, or if you want them separate for some reason. If you are a small business owner, make sure your webmaster uses these tools.
 

SEO Tutorial Page 4