Opinions On How to Master SEO!
Search algorithms and opinions are changing every day. Mastering the changes are the keys to sucesss when marketing online.
-
Unique Title Tags
Often the question comes us, how important are the title tags for SEO? The answer is very important as it defines the subject matter of the website both to the visitor and the search engine. The confusion often comes from the description tag where Google often chooses to pick a section of text from the page rather than using the allocated description tag. The keyword tag is not used by the 3 big search engines and so most seo companies don’t waste their time adding them.
Many when defining keywords for their website find themselves trying to add their keywords to every title tag on the site in the hope that Google or another search engine will give it more clout. The reality is that it can water down your final results. If the title tag does not accurately define what the subject matter of the page is and if every page does not have unique content then it is unlikely to work. This then can affect many designers and customers with a web design.
So many web designer create includes header files, which show the same header throughout the whole site. This is a good idea for menus and logos within, but when it comes to title tags there needs to be some code within the includes header to ensure a unique title tag is created that could for example match the H1 tags or the url of that page. The worst thing you can do, is have the same title tag running through the whole site. How do you expect a search engine to know what page to show for that search term?
So the summary is simple. Take time to accurately add unique title tags to every page within your website that matches the content of that page. Do not push in too many keywords and do not repeat a keyword more than twice. Simple rules, but can go a long way.
-
The New Canonical Meta Tag
For some time now many sites have been dogged with duplicate content issues, or when it occurs to your own site it is known as canonical issues. As you know this is when you may have several versions of the same content on your site, due to the way many database sites are created especially shopping carts. This can also occur with non www , index and no index types file names, where you ended up with several homepages depending on how you link with the site.
Google has struggled to deal with different versions of a page, normally choosing one page as a master and then discarding or not degrading the other versions. The problems arise when Google chooses the wrong version of the page to shown as the master, because it found that version first.
The way Google wants to deal with this issue is to introduce the canonical tag, which you input within the head area to tell Google which page is the main one you want to be included within its search engine index. For many this may seem unimportant, but in hard to get search terms, canonical issues can mean the difference between ranking and not, it is also surprising how few SEO companies are fully aware of the problems it could cause.
The employee we all like to here from, namely Matt cuts talks about the canonical tag within an interview an example being
Any professional seo company would consider adding this tag, and for certainly important pages and I would enter it for all pages that may be duplicated in some form. This still may require a bit of coding for shopping carts or dynamic pages.