Free Search Engine Optimization - A Search Engine Tutorial - Keyword Phrases, Title Tags, Meta Tags, Linking

Comprehensive guide to Organic, Natural, Free Search Engine Optimization. Page 2

Search Engine Tutorial page 2 continued from page 1

Technical SEO techniques for expert optimization of your web pages

Ideally each of your web pages has one or two central ideas or topics. Now it's time to clue Google in on what the page is all about with these free search engine optimization techniques using only white hat methods. Not only is this free search engine optimization, with a little effort on your part following these guidelines, it will be professional expert SEO as well!

Web page title, make it clear, concise, and try to work in several keyword phrases

The title is one of the most important elements on your page.  Your title tells Google the overall topic of your page and it's the first thing searchers see on the results page.  Your title needs to tell your searcher what the page is about clearly and distinctly so that the user either clicks on it or at least reads the text under it.

Short titles in general are bad. A short title doesn't convey much information, doesn't allow for many keywords, phrases, or long tails. Let's take an example from that photographer’s site.  A short title might be:

 "Stock Photos - John Lund Photography".

If you are searching for "stock photo" this is ok, or even a long-tailed phrase like “Stock Photos by John Lund" would be fine.  It's likely with the later phrase you will find what you are looking for.  For the phrase "stock photos" only the Lord knows what the searcher is looking for, and when I last checked Google listed a whopping 114,000,000 competing websites! On the other hand, "stock photos by John Lund" had 40,000 competing sites.

As an example of how well SEO works when one has good high quality content, John's site is now # 76 on Google for "stock photos", out of that 114,000,000 competing sites. Last week he was # 93 so he is moving in the right direction.

Now suppose his title was:

 “Stock Photos of Women Riding African Elephants in the Jungle - John Lund Photography"

This is a whole new ball game.  Google has a much clearer idea of what the page is about. It's about stock photos, women, the jungle, African elephants, John Lund, and photography.  These words and word combinations are in the title, and therefore judged more important than body text, or any other element on the page for that mater.

Now look at the range of keyword phrases for which your site might be found; Stock Photos, Women riding elephants, stock photos in the jungle, African elephants, stock photos of elephants, and many more. If John did assignment work he would want to include his location in the title too.

“Stock Photos of Women Riding African Elephants in the Jungle - John Lund Photography in San Francisco”

Don’t forget you are writing the title as much for humans as you are for the search engines…you want to provide them with the best information about your page that you can.  By describing accurately the content you will get more targeted viewers, a good thing.

The closer to the beginning of an element, such as the title, the more importance is given to the phrase, so in general you want your most important phrases nearest the beginning,  It’s not critical, just one of those little details than added together cumulatively raise your site to the top.

I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but make sure the spelling is correct, the punctuation is correct, the first letter of each main word should be capitalized, and there should not be a period at the end.  Pay attention to the details.

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