There’s more to SEO than using keywords
Creating search engine-friendly copy involves artfully using a combination of techniques, some simple, others less so.
Here are our basic guidelines for Search Engine Optimisation:
Content
This requires particular skill as good SEO copy involves more than indiscriminate repetition of your carefully selected key words. The rules of good writing still apply, which means your website must be enticing to humans as well as machines!
Above all, your content should be unique, well written and useful to your visitors. This can then be tweaked to make it more search engine friendly by optimising the following:
- the title
- any headings and subheadings
- the keyword density
- the text used in links
- the length of the content
Bear in mind that it is possible for a page to rank for more than one keyword or key phrase so content can be created to rank for multiple search terms with each page. But to avoid affecting readability, we would recommend that you keep the maximum number of keywords targeted per page to between two and four.
Page Title
- It’s essential to keep your article heading length to 63 characters or under as this is the length where Google truncates the titles for its search results so sentences longer than this will not make sense!
- This heading should contain the target keywords in a short but descriptive manner. A well written page title will attract visitors when viewed in Google’s search results and therefore increase the likelihood of being clicked.
Page Description
- Your page description will be a good quality short sentence that best describes your page and its content. It should ideally be 160 characters or less and will be placed in the ‘Description’ Meta tag in the code of your page. This description tag is often displayed in the search results beneath the title and an engaging description here will encourage a visitor to click through on your link.
- This ‘Description’ tag helps to inform the search engines what your page content is about but most search engines (including Google) do not consider this tag when determining page rank.
- As hardly any search engines nowadays use the ‘Keywords’ Meta tag, we would not recommend spending the time adding keywords to your page using this method.
We have only skimmed the surface of SEO here. If you’d like to know more, get in touch!
