In order for your SEO efforts to pay off, you must work on a series of things that are all necessary for optimising your website to make it search engine friendly. Because there’s so much to do, it’s easy to overlook the smaller necessary tasks you may not even know about. One overlooked element of SEO is the writing of page title tags. According to Moz, title tags are the second most important on-page factor in SEO, second only to content.

About Page Title Tags

When you search for something online, you’ll see page title tags which are the headlines on the search engine results page or SERP. For example, if you search for ‘men’s work shoes’ you’ll see one of the top results is from Dickies. The title tag is Men’s Work Shoes & Boots | Dickies. This is what both the search engines and people will see as the title of your page. And because it’s often the very first thing they’ll see, your title tags need to be what your page is actually about.

The text below the title tag is the meta description, which is a short summary or snippet of the web page. The title tag and meta description works together to provide a brief idea of what your page is about.

Why Title Tags Matter

Google’s main objective is to deliver results that are relevant to what people search for. In order for it to do that, it has to recognize what different web pages are about. Google puts a great deal of importance on a title tag, making it a key on-page ranking factor. Here are some helpful tips for writing title tags.

Many people think meta titles are so important in 2019 but they would be mistaken. In fact, many of the basic SEO principles which have been around for years are still relevant in some way today. Just ask any SEO company about page rank and if it still matters and you will see that whilst no longer labelled as such, it still plays a part.

Create a Title Tag for Each Page

Each page of your website is unique. This is why each page should have its own title tag that shows the type of information that’s on that page. Google needs to know what the individual page is about and so do online searchers. So make your title tags clear, concise, and accurate.

Stay Within the 50 to 60 Character Limit

Google displays from 50 to 60 characters of a title tag before cutting it of. Therefore, a good character count to shoot for is around 50.

Include a Target Keyword

You should include a main keyword in a title tag and place it in the beginning of the tag to ensure it shows and doesn’t get cut off. When you use a main keyword you’re targeting for that page, you’re sending Google a message that the page is relevant to people who are searching for that term.

Be Descriptive

It’s important that your title tag provides an accurate description of what people will see when they visit your page. If they click on your page only to discover the information on that page isn’t what they expected based on the title, they’ll leave quickly and look for another page to visit.

Showcase Your Brand

If you have a well-known brand, you can add it to your title tag to amp up your CTR or click through rate. Your brand name should be placed at the end of the title.

Don’t Duplicate Your Tags

As stated above, each of your page title tags needs to be unique because every page on your website is unique. If you were to duplicate your title tags, your search visibility will be negatively impacted.

Your title tags are among the most important things you have to get right in order to do well in Google. And since a title tag will tell an online searcher what’s on your page, it’s important to write these tags for people too. Keep in mind the fact that your title tags can be changed easily if you find Google or people aren’t responding well to them. So test, analyse, and change when necessary!

The post Writing Title Tags that Search Engines & People Love appeared first on Radio Academy.

The meta description tag in HTML is a 160 character summary used to tell searchers what’s on a web page. When creating content for SEO, you should always put your emphasis on writing for the user first and the search engines second. This couldn’t be truer when it comes to writing meta descriptions for your web pages, including your blog and landing pages.

You should view your meta descriptions as mini ads for your web pages. The content in your meta description tells the searcher why they should click through to your site. When you fail to craft good meta descriptions, your page snippets could look awful. The text could be cut short, important information could be missing, and unimportant page data could show.

On the other hand, when you take the time to write a clear, concise, and convincing meta description that’s keyword-optimized and of the correct length, your snippet will look great which will help entice the searcher to click through to your website. This gives you a big advantage in the search engine results pages or SERPs by providing valuable click-throughs to amp up your chances of converting visitors into new customers.

Improve CTR and Bounce Rates
Since Google uses click-through rate or CTR as a factor in how they rank pages, creating great meta descriptions is well worth it. Loosely defined, click through rate measures the number of people who click a link against the total number of people who had the opportunity to do so. For example, if your website appears on a listing on a SERP and 30% of people who view that SERP click your link, your CTR is 30%.

If you don’t know already, your bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page on your website then leave without clicking anything else or navigating your other pages. A high bounce rate tells Google that your site doesn’t contain relevant, high quality content, prompting the search engine to rank your site lower in the SERPs.

Since click through and bounce rates can be improved with good meta descriptions, it’s always worthwhile to spend a few minutes crafting a great search result snippet!

What to Include
Now that you know what a meta description is and why it’s important, it’s time to learn how to create meta descriptions that drive clicks and convert. For example’s sake, let’s say you own a dog grooming business in Leeds. You want your meta description to contain one of your main keywords, your location, and a call to action that prompts searchers to click through to your site. Try to keep the content as close to the 160 character limit. Your meta description could look like ‘We offer high quality, affordable dog grooming in Leeds for your beloved pet. We can bathe, cut, clip, and style your dog, big or small! Book a time today!’

Keep It Relevant and Conversational
It’s very important that your meta description matches the content on the page. Nobody wants to read a meta description and click through to find the page has nothing to do with what was in the description. Try to use a conversational tone that connects with people, instead of sounding robotic. To recap, your meta description should:

    • Contain up to 160 characters
     
    • Be written in an actionable and conversational voice

    • Include a main keyword

    • Include a call to action

    • Match the page’s content

    • Be unique

Meta descriptions tell online searchers what you have to offer and why they should visit your website. These short snippets of information should be well-written to drive traffic to your site and make those conversions you need.

The post Writing Meta Descriptions that Convert appeared first on Radio Academy.

Do you roll your eyes when you see some type of news about page rank (so do most SEO experts)? It’s understandable if you think this metric isn’t worth your time anymore because after all, Google killed its Toolbar PageRank years ago.

You might be surprised to learn that Google does indeed still take page rank into consideration when deciding where sites should end up in its SERPs. As you know, page rank is a way for Google to rank web pages according to importance, using the number and quality of a page’s inbound links to determine it.

Even though Google won’t disclose how it uses the page rank metric to rank pages, a top employee at Google named Gary Illyes has stated publicly, more than once, that page rank is still a part of Google’s algorithm, even though the Toolbar PageRank is dead and gone.

How Page Rank Works

To understand how page rank works, it’s first important to learn what it is. Google’s page rank or PR as it’s often called, is a mathematical formula designed to judge the value of a page by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. This formula works to determine the relative importance of a given page in the network of the world wide web.

As far as how it works, page rank is determined by taking into account three factors of a web page:

• The number and quality of inbound linking pages

• The number of outbound links on each linking page

• The page rank of each linking page

How to Maintain & Improve Your Page Rank

Even though it’s not possible to see your page rank score or measure it directly, there are some steps you can take to maintain & increase your website’s page rank.

Build Quality Backlinks

Backlinks come to your site from other sites that link to you. To Google, backlinks are a major ranking factor. Google says that the more authoritative sites that link to you, the better rankings and organic traffic you’ll get.

You can get high quality backlinks in a number of ways including:

• Offering to replace broken links on other relevant websites with your own

• Creating amazing, shareable infographics for your site that you can distribute to infographic directories

• Writing guest articles for relevant sites

• Writing testimonials for websites you frequent in exchange for links

Use the Right Internal Linking Structure: Internal links are links that go from one page on your site to a different page on your site. Google uses these links to determine the information hierarchy on your site, which means the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO.

When you have the right internal links on your website, Google will understand the relevance of your pages, the relationship between your pages, and the value of your pages. The key to developing a strong structure for your internal links involves a few basic steps including:

• Using internal links often

• Linking to a wide variety of internal pages

• Linking to your most important content first

• Keeping your links and anchor text relevant

Fix Broken Pages

A backlink amps up the authority of your web page it points to, and it even boosts all the internally-linked pages on your site. This is because page rank flows from page to page via internal links. If you have any backlinks pointing to a broken page, that page is wasting link juice because there’s no place for it to go from there. This is why you need to fix those broken pages with 404 errors.

There are many tools out there to use that can check for broken pages including Google’s own Search Console. To find 404 pages in Search Console, log into your account, click on “crawl errors’ under diagnostics and then on “not found”. There you will see a list of all the links resulting in the 404 error. Then it’s just a matter of clicking on any URL to find all the pages where the broken link is linked to so you can edit those links and let Google recrawl your site.

Conclusion: Don’t be misled by what you may have read about Page Rank being dead. It is still a metric Google uses to determine where your site will end up in the search result pages.

The post Why Page Rank Still Matters & How to Boost Yours appeared first on Radio Academy.