Website Optimization Basics

This tutorial covers the basics on how to tune your website so that it will show up in search results for your desired category. It is very important to make these simple changes to your website so that it will show up in search results, because after all what good is having an awesome website if no one can find it?

The first step we are going to cover is the title tag. The title tag is in the header section of your web page, and this tag controls what is shown in the browser bar at the top of a website. For instance at the top of our blog is says [Altec Designs Blog] It is important to Edit this tag for several reasons. This shows users what your web page is about, it helps to show search engines what you web page is about, and the title tag is also what will show up in search engine results. For an example of this try going to Google and searching [Altec Designs Blog] You will notice that the Link to our blog in google is the same as our title tag.

I bet you also noticed that there was a small description for our Blog on Google as well which leads me to my next tip, Meta tags. You will want to add the following tags to the header of your website just under the Title tag:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your website Description Here “>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your website keywords here “>

Now these two tags have become somewhat outdated because people have notoriously abused them, but it is still a good idea to include them in your page. For the Description you will want to write a brief description of the services your website offers. This is what [in most cases] will be displayed on different search engines as the small description of your site. You will want to keep this brief because about 20-25 words is all that will actually be displayed on Google and other search engines.

For the Keywords Meta tag that is listed above you will want to include any words or phrases that people might enter in to find your website. It is important to only included words that will be found on your website, you do not want to type random words such as [nhl hockey] just because they get a lot of searches. This will do you no good because the user who finds your site while searching these terms would not be happy and most likely just leave because it is not what they are looking for, but more importantly Google and other SERP’s will think that you are trying to trick them and penalize you. You will want to put about 200-250 keywords in this Meta tag, and try to keep them as on topic as possible.

Now onto title tags, H1, H2, and H3 tags:

These tags are all called “title tags”. They go in importance from H1 all the way down to H6 and beyond with H1 being the most important. What they are used for is to tell what your page is about. You will want to place an H1 tag at the top of your web page, and this tag should be labeled what your website is about. For example the H1 tag on this post is [Website Optimization Basics]. Then if your page has multiple topics you will want to go ahead and place H2, H3, H4 etc… tags on these topics.

Ok, well that covers the basics of tuning your website for your desired search results. We will go into detail in another tutorial about tracking your results, but these 4 simple techniques will really help you make a big difference in getting traffic to your website.

As always if you have any questions about any part of this tutorial feel free to drop us a note in the comments section below and someone from our team will get back to you.