“Amene to SEO” – The HEAD element.

Back to SEO basics. How should you do your site/blog’s search engine optimisation? Many elements get into the picture but there are some simple rules to follow to optimise a page. Let’s start with the head part.

The head part of a page is the one that will have the most impact on your visitors via search engines. The head part is what the robots use to build their SERPs (Search Engine results pages). This means that the first thing a visitor will see of your page on a search engine is the head so you’d better polish things up a bit.

Anatomy of a search engine result.

Below is a detailed view of a search engine result off Google’s first SERP.

As you can notice, the title tag is the one that is shown as linked in blue and the meta is used to describe the page’s content. Other thing that you will notice on this specific result is that there are no suspension marks on either the title or the description.

You might consider the result below. The title part has supension marks as well as the description. Though it gives information is triggers the thought: “This looks amateurish”.

Last thing, please, please do not put any HTML tag in the title because it does not do anything but waste character space!

So here is the recipe on how to optimise this part.

The title tag.

The title tag must not exceed 65 characters (spaces included), 65 being the number of characters Google shows on SERPs. This is how you don’t get the suspension marks. Another thing, to bear in mind, especially on blogs, long blog names and what not in the title just eat up space. Get rid of them, shorten the site name in the title to give more space to the real title.

Another thing that has been tested and proved efficient is the place where the site name is shown. On many sites, the site name is shown, then the real title. If the sitename is long, a lot of the characters are eaten up. The practice now is to put the sitename at the end of the title. If the title exceeds the 65 characters, it will just be deleted on the SERP but will still be present in the URL. So no worries on that. Your aim is to bring people to your site not show off your sitename.

So what is the real title? This actually is the title that is related to the content of the post/page. Careful, it is not the title of your post for example. E.g. say you have a page on Chicken Curry on your culinary blog and the introduction title is Cheap Chicken Curry. Your title might be “Chicken curry recipe with aubergines and potatoes under 30 rupees.” There you have your under 65 characters title.

To fully optimise this title, let’s say that your target keyword is “chicken curry recipe”, you have also added the keyword in your title. This therefore works for both attracting visitors through search engines and second for good positions in SERPs on specific keywords.

The meta description tag

The meta description is what will convince the visitor having been attracted by your title to visit the page. The meta description in Google does not exceed 150 characters. Staying in this range will get you to have a full stop end in the SERP description, giving you a cleaner aspect as well as more professional looking result.

Your sitename can be present in there but once again, you’ll find that 150 characters is pretty short and does require some reflexion. So better keep long site names out. The other important thing is to get your keyword(s) in there while giving out a clear and concise description of what the person will find on the page.

E.g. On the same “chicken curry recipe” page and keyword, you can get two occurrances of the keyword in the description while keeping it underthe 150 characters limit. Check it out:
“Need a cheap chicken curry recipe? Find out a cheap chicken curry recipe with aubergines and potatoes for only 30 rupees on My Cheap Recipes Blog.”

Conclusion

Finally, some words in the search results are in bold. These are the keywords I searched for on Google. Google puts them in bold, so use them to stand out of the crowd but do it smartly with a balanced mixture of well though text and important keywords.

Nota for non Mauritian readers: the title of this post starts with a Creole pun “Amene to SEO” translates in “Bring your bucket”.