TITLES AND DESCRIPTIONS GO A LONG WAY
When the only thing you know about SEO is that it could help your website rank better, a good first step is to start with titles and descriptions for individual webpages.
Optimizing titles and descriptions is something that could take hours to fine-tune perfectly, or it could be a simple 2-minute task.
For WordPress website owners, you have the convenience of using an SEO plugin that will allow you to easily set a title and description for each page. My favorite WordPress SEO plugin would be SEO Yoast.
Website title guidelines
Say you have a webpage that revolves around wedding photography. Out of the box, your page title might be “Home – My wedding photography website” and your description might be blank.
Instead of sticking to that automated title, let’s personalize it a bit, as this title says nothing about your business, here’s a good alternative: “Anurag Wedding Photography | good County, “.india
Length: Keep a webpage title under about 50-55 characters long to prevent it from being cut off by Google.
Why is this a good alternative?
- Your webpage has received an identity, “Johnson Wedding Photography”
- It’s clear what you do for traffic and search engines, “Wedding Photography”
- Your location “Orange County” is known to traffic before they ever even land on your website, since your title will display in Google
- Your targeted public is narrowed down and you will enjoy lower competition on search engines
So, not only does your title look better, it also has multiple hidden benefits that will drive more targeted traffic to your website, and it will allow you to rank better along the way.
Website description guidelines
Unlike webpage titles, descriptions have no SEO value according to Google, but it allows you to write a small sales copy for each individual webpage. So even this does not affect how your page ranks, it allows you to convince possible traffic you are what they are looking for, example:
When you leave the description tag empty, Google will simply load some content that’s on your webpage. In some cases this is fine, in other cases, it loads content that’s simply unattractive, such as your menu, image alt text, etc.
Length: Keep webpage descriptions under 140-150 characters long, and do not use the same description for multiple pages.
CONTENT IS KING, SEO SIMPLY HELPS PEOPLE FIND IT
The biggest mistake people make is thinking that SEO will help their website rank regardless of the content.
SEO is meant to make it easier for search engines find your content, when that content is junk or exists out of 100 words, you could hire all the SEO experts in the world and you still may not ever be able to find your website in Google’s results.
So in short, garbage content WITH SEO = no results but the opposite is very well possible, quality content WITHOUT SEO = results.
This makes it very clear that content should always be your top priority. If you don’t have the time, skills, or even interest to improve your quality, most SEO experts will have solutions ready for you.
NARROWING DOWN YOUR TARGETED PUBLIC
In my years as a freelancer and SEO expert, I’ve learned that many customers don’t have a clue when it comes to SEO. I mostly see this in my service branch “Life Insurance Web Design“.
When I work with a life insurance agent or company, they usually don’t really have an idea what has to happen to rank better. They – like most people – expect that if they pay you, they will see results. Obviously, this is only fair, if you pay a service provider, they must provide a service.
Example: you own a life insurance website, so you want to rank your website for “life insurance”. Great idea, but life insurance is one of the most competitive markets on the internet. You’re up against million dollar companies, along with websites that have been around for a decade or longer.
In short, unless you have time, a million-dollar budget, and a team of SEO experts available, your website will most likely never rank for “life insurance”.
Does this mean that the competition has beat you before your website has even reached the online world? No, it’s called narrowing down your targeted public.
When you focus on more specific keywords/phrases, the competition will decrease majorly. With this I do not mean “term life insurance” instead of “life insurance”, but something even more specific such as “life insurance for diabetics” or even “can I get life insurance as a diabetic?”.
The more you narrow down your targeted public, the easier your website will become available for that public. Yes, you may be targeting 50,000 people instead of the entire country, but if those 50,000 people can find you easily on a search engine, that may be well worth it.
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