Case in point is a client I just finished working with. He has years of experience in his field, and his company is a 1-stop shop for all the needs people have when it comes to his particular service. He’s the personality behind the business, and the new website reflects this – which makes him a perfect candidate to start blogging.

How blogging helps your business

When he first asked me about blogging, the advice I gave him was based on my own experiences as a small business owner who blogs, and was that it could really help his business if he blogged regularly on your website. (Especially since he was already using WordPress.)

Here are some ways that blogging can help your business:

• Helps you reach out to clients and potential clients
• Establishes you as a subject-matter expert
• Gives you free publicity through search engine results
• Brings more web traffic to your website
• Makes your website more lively and friendly
• De-mystifies your business and makes it (and you) more approachable
• Lets you easily provide news, specials, etc.
• Helps you communicate in a timely fashion
• Builds a following of readers or visitors, who might turn into clients one day
• Provides technical support, online documentation, etc. – again, all part of establishing you as a subject-matter expert

I know that writing regular blog posts has helped my business out tremendously. One of the biggest benefits is that it helped me find my voice when articulating web design concepts to other people. Ultimately I think this has translated into a confidence in my professional skills and abilities.

Of course, the increased web traffic and better search engine results certainly hasn’t hurt either. Some of the posts that I’ve written have received a great deal of web traffic, none of which would have found my website otherwise. And since Google and the major search engines factor in the context of your website and what you’re writing about, the more keyword-rich content on it, the better off you’ll be.

Just remember…

While blogging is a great way to benefit your small business, I try to remind people that success with blogging isn’t easy and doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of hard work, but that’s a concept that any small business owner already knows.

So if you want to start blogging, here are some things to keep in mind as you get down to it:

• Leave time to write regularly – Give yourself time to write. You may be swamped already, but set a schedule and stick to it, even if that means only publishing content once a week. No one says you need to publish content every day anyways.
• Keep expectations in check – It took me over a year to get 100 subscribers to my blog, but I don’t define success just by my subscriber count. Given the other benefits that I’ve received from blogging, I think I’m successful. So what do you expect to gain from blogging?
• Learn to write different – Writing for a website is much different than the more formal writing that people are used to. You might not find your blog voice right away, but keep at it, do some research into how to write for a blog (see some of the links below), and you’ll ultimately find it.
• You have info people want – As a small business owner, you have knowledge that people want to know – that’s why they’re coming to you in the first place. If you’re able to translate that knowledge into quality blog, people will find it and want to read it.
• Think journal entry, not thesis – You don’t have to write a lengthy dissertation for each blog post that you put together. Keep it short and on topic, and you’ll get your readers more engaged with what you’re talking about.

If you want more information about the art of blogging, there are a lot of great websites out there that can provide a ton of content for you to look through. I read some of these myself, so I can personally recommend them:

• Copyblogger
• Daily Blog Tips
• Problogger
• 25 Blogs About Blogging (great resource list)

Thoughts?

If you’re a small business owner who blogs regularly, do you have any tips, success, or advice that you think others might benefit from? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts with everyone!

Let’s start by making sure that you understand what exactly keywords are, and then I’ll go over some tips to help you choose the keywords you should optimize for.

What exactly are keywords?

The term “keywords” gets thrown around a lot when people hear about search engine optimization, but do you know what a keyword really is?

Keywords, or keyword phrases, are specific terms that people use on a search engine to help them find a website, service, product, etc. Things like the name of your business are obviously keywords, but so are the services or products that your business sells – basically, anything that people might use to search for your website.

8 easy ways to find keywords

Creating a list of keywords to optimize for isn’t that difficult. What is difficult is finding variations of those keywords that will make your website more competitive in related search engine results.

So what are some of the ways that you can find keywords for your SEO efforts or campaign? Here are some easy ways to come up with a broad keyword list to start working from:

• Make a list – Start by writing down what it is that you do, i.e., what specific products or services you offer. Add to that list your business name and your location, and you have a good starting point. These are the most basic keywords that you should optimize for.
• Check out the competition – Take a look at some of the websites of your competitors, especially the ones that rank well in search engine results. You should be able to spot their keywords easily enough. What are some of the keywords they’re using?
• Ask your past customers – Finding out how people found you in the past is a great way to know how potential customers are searching for you, especially if you can find out what keywords they searched for when they came across your website.
• Ask outsiders – People looking for a specific product generally know what keywords to search for. But what about the people who don’t know what keywords they would use to search for a particular service or product? Getting their input can be just as valuable as people “in the know”.
• Internal search results – If you have a search tool on your website, take a look at some of the search phrases that people are typing in. By looking at what people are searching for, you can get an idea of what keywords you could optimize for.
• By using free research tools – There are plenty of free keyword research tools out there, although I prefer Google’s keyword research tool. You can type in a word and it will give you related keywords that you can sort by search volume, search competition, and more.
• Include Common misspellings – It might not be a bad idea to include common misspellings of keywords that people often use. Words like “accommodation” are often misspelled, so include some of the common variations that people might use.
• British vs. American English – There are some words that are spelled differently in the British version of English than the American version of English. “Colour” vs. “color”, “theatre” vs. “theater”, etc. Depending on your market, you might want to take these into account.

Your goal in finding keywords in any of these different ways is to put together as broad a list of keywords as possible. Why do I say that? It’s because now you’re going to take that list and start whittling it down, making some strategic decisions about which of those particular keywords to actually optimize for.

3 criteria for choosing keywords

Choosing keywords is much different, and arguably more difficult, than just finding keywords. You don’t want to optimize for every keyword common to your service or product that you’ve found – in fact, that would be poor SEO strategy, and you probably wouldn’t rank very highly if you did so.

Search engine results today are all about providing the user with the content that most matches the intent of what they’re looking for. You want to choose your keywords accordingly so that they match that intent as best as possible. In order to do that, there are three key properties that you want your keywords to have in order to benefit your optimization efforts the most. You want to choose keywords to optimize for that are:

• Relevant – Choosing keywords that no one uses will make it very unlikely that anyone will find you. For example, are you optimizing for “accommodation”, which sounds very formal, or would it be better to use “hotel” instead? Think in terms of how people actually speak.
• Specific – Optimizing for the most general keywords is very difficult, since  everyone else is doing the same thing and competing for those keywords. While you should still include general keywords to some degree, if you can find more specific keywords, you might be better off.
• Local – Make sure that you incorporate your location as one of your main keywords. Search results aim to be as relevant and specific as possible to what someone is looking for, and this will help narrow down the results significantly (depending on where you live).

Only when you’ve gone through your initial list and narrowed it down to the targeted keywords that you want to optimize for are you ready to do something with them. From the web design perspective, there are 9 places to insert keywords on your website, so work with your web designer, web developer, or web content writer to make sure they’re used where they can and/or should be.

Thoughts?

How do you find and/or choose keywords that you want to optimize your website for? Share your thoughts about this topic and anything else I’ve mentioned here by leaving a comment below!

Although there are lots of places that I’ll talk about where you can use your keywords, as you’re designing the website and writing the content, you don’t want to do is overload them in every available spot.

Yes, the goal is to take advantage of all the opportunities you have to incorporate keywords on your website. You shouldn’t be doing so in a way that’s going to make your website less usable though. Use your keywords in these places in ways that are relevant to your content and that improve your website’s usability.

In terms of the keywords themselves, I can’t tell you what keywords to use – that’s dependent on your business and on your keyword research. Once you have your keywords though, here are 9 places where you can put them to improve your website’s SEO.

In your header

1. Title tags

Title tags are the first places that the search engines will scan, and they are what appear as the actual link on the search engine results page. This is one of the most important places to emphasize your keywords, so make sure that the title tag on each page uses your most important keywords.

The title tag is also what your visitors will see in their web browsers, both in the title area and on tabs (if they’re using tabbed browsing). This is one of the areas where it’s tough to remember that SEO isn’t just about pleasing the search engines – it’s also about pleasing your human visitors. They will use the title tag as a primary means of identification and navigation, which is why it needs to be written well-enough to please both parties – definitely not an easy feat.

2. META description tag

Within your header, there are a number of hidden META tags that only the search engines will see, and the META description tag is one of these hidden tags. On the search engine results page, you can generally see the META description tag by looking at the chunk of text underneath the link.

When writing your META description tag, it’s extremely important to be as concise as possible. The search engines generally only look at the first 150 characters of the description tag, so you only have a limited window in which to get your keywords in. Some search engines only use a part of it before taking some content from elsewhere on the page, so it’s even more important that you incorporate your keywords right up front in your description.

3. META keywords tag

It’s still being debated how much weight the search engines give to the META keywords tag. In the early days of search, websites used to cram this tag full of any and all keywords or keyword combinations, in the hopes that the search engines would grasp onto something.

Most search engines learned from that and have changed how they weigh this tag in the search algorithm. Now it’s all about how the META keywords relate to the content on your page, which is why you need to use keywords that are relevant to the website in general and to the page in question specifically.

In your content

4. Headers and Sub-headers

One of my 10 tips for improving your titles and sub-headers is to put any keywords you’re using in them up front. Doing so not only emphasizes what comes in the content below, but is useful for people scanning through your website quickly. Just try to keep it clear, concise, and relevant when doing so.

5. Page content

Your page content is reason your website’s exists in the first place, and it’s the backbone of everything else on your website. It’s also what people link to (and links are another contributing factor to SEO) and what will draw people to your website in the first place.

One big consideration when writing your content is keyword density. While your best bet is to incorporate your targeted keyword phrase into your content as often as possible, you want to be careful not to overdo it. You’re not trying to sell your product to search engines; you’re trying to sell it to people, and if your content reads horribly, it can make a bad impression and most likely decrease the chance of making a conversion.

We’ve all seen websites where the keyword density is so high that the content reads horribly. As long as you’re simply aware of the phrase you’re targeting when you’re writing the content, you should end up with an adequate keyword density, probably within the 3-5% range. It’s alright if the targeted keywords stand out when you read through your content; after all, that’s what the person was searching for, and seeing it emphasized will reinforce that they have the information they need to make their decision.

Also remember the 1-to-1 rule: 1 page of content should be optimized for 1 keyword.

6. Link text

One of my reasons for avoiding using “click here” in link text is that it’s not SEO-friendly. Search engines use the strength of your links in their algorithm, and one of the things that determines link strength is whether the link text using specific keywords in it.

Use specific keywords in your link text helps them estimate how relevant that link is. It also helps build the relevancy of a particular page to a particular keyword phrase.

With all of the places on your website where links are, this doesn’t apply solely to links within your page content. It applies to your main navigation links, to your breadcrumbs (as I mentioned already), to your footer links, etc. It’s all about association, and you want the search engines to associate certain keywords with your website in general and with specific pages on your website in particular.

Bonus places

7. Breadcrumbs

Another common navigation tool on websites, breadcrumbs can help people pinpoint where they are on your website, as well as how to get back to where they were previously. As with any place you have words on your website, your breadcrumbs are another opportunity for you to incorporate your keywords. Just make sure that the breadcrumb links provide enough detail about what the pages are, without being overly length – 1 to 3 words at most.

8. ALT and TITLE attributes

While these attributes were created for usability purposes, they don’t have to be used solely in those ways. They can also be used for SEO purposes in the sense that they’re another opportunity for you to incorporate additional text onto your page – text that contain the keywords you’re optimizing for.

I’ve written previously about using the ALT and TITLE attributes properly, but the important point is that you shouldn’t write them with only the search engines in mind.

Keep them relevant to the element in question, and don’t use them to either duplicate content elsewhere on the page or to stuff them full of keywords to the point that they become completely unhelpful. Above all when it comes to them, think usability first, SEO second.

9. Embedded file names

What I’m referring to as embedded file names are things like web pages, images, etc. These aren’t necessarily things that people will see within your actual content – they’re just ways that you can get more keywords onto your page.

How you write file names should be a no-brainer, but it’s important that you not give them a generic or vague label. People will see the file name of a web page when they hover over a link, so using a file name that contains the keywords that the page is about is useful from usability purposes. (This is one of the main reasons why you should enable your permalinks in WordPress; with HTML websites, you have an easier time controlling the file names.

When it comes to images, why name your image files something vague such as “image01.jpg” when you can name it something that includes a keyword instead? It’s not something that someone will see or that will really make a difference, but it’s just another spot where you can get the keyword onto the page for the search engines to see it.

Thoughts?

There are a lot of competing schools of thought when it comes to organic SEO. What are some of your practical tips for incorporating keywords onto your website? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

While some of these things fall into what I would call basic design practices that should always be done, others are what I think of as the little extra touches the designer can do to make a website that much better.

No matter what you call them, what everything on this list has in common is that they’re extra value that clients are receiving for their financial investment. It’s something that I communicate to them when giving a cost estimate for their project because it shows both how I’ll be spending the time and what they’re getting for what they’re paying.

See how many of these things you do when working on a website for a client – and if you’re not doing them, consider adding them to your regular design process.

Design and Navigation

• Create an error page – You may have checked every single link on your website, but it’s still inevitable that some visitors will type a URL wrong or somehow get to a page that doesn’t exist. A custom 404 error page will help your users find what they’re looking for when that happens.
• Add a favicon – Favicons are the little icons that you see at the top of a browser window and in your bookmarks list. They’re a great finishing touch for any website to have, and can even have some small usability benefits – great reasons for why websites should always use favicons.
• Validate the site markup – Make sure your website adheres to web standards before you launch. Validated websites load faster, better, and on more web browsers, and are also “future proof” in the sense that all web browsers will handle the website as you designed it.
• Cross-browser test – Your website should look and functions the same in all of the major web browsers and on all of the popular operating systems. Most of the popular cross-browser testing tools, such as Browser Shots, also test your website in various screen resolutions as well.

Server Optimization

• Resize images accordingly - If you’re calling an image from the server and the image files is really large even though it’s being displayed much smaller, resizing ahead of time will speed up the load time of that page, and help keep the amount of server space you’re using up at a minimum.
• Put javascript in the footer – If you’re calling external Javascript within your website, putting them in the header means that the server will try to load them first before loading your content. Putting them in the footer loads the content first before fetching the script – much more desirable.
• Clean up server of working files – While developing a website, I often find myself with extra files on the server that I had used at some point but am not using any longer. I delete those unnecessary files so that what’s on the server is only what’s being used somewhere on the website.

Search Engine Optimization

• Generate a sitemap – Creating a sitemap is useful for your users as a navigation tool, but for the search engines perspective it will help them find new content on your website faster than by relying on their crawler to find it. This will help you get more of content noticed and more links followed.
• Submit URL to search engines – If you’re launching a new website, the search engines won’t know about it unless you tell them to come and crawl your website. This one of the simple steps to bolster SEO on your website, so at a minimum submit the URL to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Create a robots.txt file – This file tells the search engine spiders what they can and can’t crawl on your website. If you don’t want them to look at certain directories, this is where you would specify that. One way this might be useful for SEO is as a way to avoid duplicate content on your website.

Content

• Proofread your content one last time – There’s no excuse for spelling or grammar mistakes on a website. If you’ve written content for a website, such as links, intro text, etc., having extra eyes looking at it to make sure everything sounds good and is written properly will make sure any errors are caught.
• Check for broken links one last time – You can spend all the time in the world making your website as great as possible, but if you have broken links on it, the website looks bad. Before you launch, click through all the links on the website to verify that everything works properly.
• Set up Google analytics – Understanding what content your visitors are looking at on your website is absolutely essential in order to make it as effective as possible. Google Analytics is not only free, but incredibly popular and easy to use, which is why I use it on all my client websites.

Thoughts?

Is there anything that I didn’t list here that your normally do when you launch a new website for a client? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

What is duplicate content?

Simply put, duplicate content is any text on your website that either completely matches, or is similar to, content elsewhere on your website. While there are acceptable kinds of duplicate content – print-only versions of a web page, for example – in other cases people intentionally use duplicate content across multiple domains in an attempt to get more traffic to their website from search engine results.

It’s the latter usage of duplicate content that is the reason Google and the other major search engines penalize you for having it on your website. There’s no way for them to understand the intent of why the content might be duplicate – even if you aren’t duplicating content maliciously – so they just penalize it altogether.

That being the case then, optimizing your website so that it avoids duplicate content is something you need to do if you’re interested in your website’s placement in search engine results.

(For more tips and explanations from Google about duplicate content, read through their page on the subject in the webmasters/site owners guide.)

5 ways to avoid duplicate content

When you install WordPress out of the box, it’s not duplicate content proof – and that especially pertains to your blog posts and how they’re displayed. For example, if you have your category, archive, and home pages all set up so that they display the full text of your blog posts, guess what you have? Duplicate content.

Here are 5 simple changes you can make to avoid duplicate content on your WordPress website:

• Display the full text once and only once – My rule of thumb is that the full text of a blog post should only be displayed on the actual page of the blog post itself. Everywhere else your recent blog posts are listed, you should either have the excerpt appear, or just the name of the post and a link the full text of it. To display the excerpt only, you can either update your theme files, find a plugin to do it for you, or just use the <!–more–> tag when writing your content.
• Fix your page header – You should insert the following code into your theme’s header file to make sure that certain pages (such as the homepage, posts, pages and category pages) are indexed by search engines spiders, while certain others (feeds, archives, etc.) are excluded :<?php if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()){
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
} ?>
• Be aware of comment pagination – In WordPress 2.7, you have the option of separating your comments onto multiple pages rather than lengthening the actual post page. The only problem with this is that for every page of comments, you’re duplicating the content that people are commenting on. This function is enabled by default in WordPress 2.7, so if you don’t have a need for your comments to be paginated, go to the “Discussion” area under settings and uncheck that option.
• Add unique META descriptions to each post – I’ve written about META tag issues in WordPress previously, but the most important META tag to consider here is your description. If you have the same META description on all of your blog posts or pages, that’s duplicate content. I recommend the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin (what I use on this website) because it lets you use your excerpt (or whatever text you want) as the META description, thus avoiding duplicate content.
• Update your robots.txt file – If you don’t want search engine spiders to find unintentional duplicate content on your website, put some instructions in your robots.txt file that tells them what they shouldn’t crawl. In WordPress, that means making sure you exclude your feeds and any other auxiliary pages that duplicate content you have elsewhere. The following code will do the trick – just copy and paste it into your robots.txt file:
  User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/trackback/$

Thoughts?

If you’re a web designer or developer and have a WordPress website (or have built WordPress websites for your clients), how do you help them avoid duplicate content on their websites? Are there any tips or suggestions that I didn’t mention that you feel would be useful to others? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

Webmaster Tools

Google’s suite of webmaster tools can tell you all sorts of information relating to how Google indexes your website. You don’t have to insert any code on your website to enable these tools, but you do have to make sure that Google is looking at your website. (As soon as you log in to the webmaster tools, it will tell you whether it is, so if it’s not, you can submit the URL to have your website crawled.)

Some of the most noteworthy things you can do within these webmaster tools include:

• Submit a sitemap – Creating a sitemap is one of those basic SEO steps that I’ve written about in the past. Submitting your sitemap directly to Google, which you can do here, will help Google’s crawler find pages on your website that it might not find otherwise.
• See your rank in top search query results – You can see a list of what people typed into Google that somehow led them to your website, as well as the rank that your website appeared in the search results for that query. This can be useful in evaluating how successful you’ve been at optimizing your content around the keywords you chose.
• Generate a robots.txt file – The robots.txt file tells the search engine crawlers what to look at and what to ignore when they visit your website. If you don’t have one already, this tool can help you create and analyze your robots.txt file.

Google Analytics

Google’s analytics package help you analyze the traffic that your website receives. Unlike when you use the webmaster tools I mentioned above, here you have to embed some code onto your website in order for Google to receive data from your website, but there are step-by-step instructions provided for how to do this.

Once Google verifies that the tracking code is working and begins to import data, you can analyze your web traffic in a wide variety of different ways. From a web design perspective, here are some of the things you can see that I find most important:

• See your visitors’ browser capabilities – There is a lot of data that Google gathers from your website’s visitors, but these tools allow you to know many things such as their screen resolutions, screen colors, etc. One important tool that I find particularly useful lets you see which web browsers your visitors are using (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.). Why is that important? Different web browsers render websites differently, so knowing that the majority of your website’s visitors use one browser over another might save you time by eliminating the need for cross-browser testing.
• Know where the traffic is coming from – What websites are visitors finding your website through? Are there referring sites that are driving traffic to your website, or are the search engines the primary sources? Both will benefit you in the search engines, but significant numbers of the latter tell you that the SEO work you did on your website is paying off.

Other Google Tools to Use

Website Optimizer

Google’s website optimizer helps you test variations of different elements on your website, often from a usability perspective, to see which helps convert visitors the best. These changes can be small, like changing the size, color, or wording of an element on your website, but they can all have a big impact. Basically, this helps you make sure that your website is doing what it’s intended to.

Keyword Research Tool

Google’s keywords tool helps you research keyword and keyword variations to use when optimizing your website. You can analyze the keywords by search volume or by the competition for that keyword, both of which are important to consider when deciding which keywords you should incorporate in your SEO efforts.

Thoughts?

Now that you know more about Google’s free tools, if you don’t already use them, are you considering using them? Or if you already use them, what features or tools have you found particularly useful? Share with everyone by filling out the comment form below!

What I’d like to talk about are the characteristics and general rules about how and when to use each attribute. But first, let me give you a little background on just what these attributes are.

ALT Attribute

“ALT” simply standards for “alternative”, and ALT attributes are intended to be descriptions that can be seen instead of images, either before the image loads or if it does not load at all.

The ALT attribute is an important element to the accessibility community. It began as a way for people who are blind and use screen readers (or people who use text-only web browsers) to know when there was an image on the page they were reading.

From an SEO perspective, ALT attributes may or may not benefit your website – there is still no conclusive school of thought on the subject. Most people will agree though that tThey are just another opportunity for you to put code on your page that the search engines will read, and should be taken advantage of as one of the basic steps to make your website SEO-friendly.

That being said though, don’t abuse the ALT attribute for SEO purposes only. Keep in mind some of these tips for how to write them:

• Make them as specific and descriptive as possible without being too lengthy
• If an image contains text, the ALT attribute should replicate the text in full
• Avoid being vague or writing text that isn’t related to the image or context of the content around it
• Don’t use the image’s file name as the ALT attribute

TITLE Attribute

The TITLE attribute can be used with almost all HTML elements on your website. While the ALT attribute emerged from the accessibility world, the TITLE attribute emerged from the usability standpoint.

There are two main roles that TITLE attributes can have:

• Descriptive – Use the TITLE attribute on such things as form fields to let your visitors know what the intended purpose of an element on your website is.
• Advisory – Use TITLE attributes on text or image links to let visitors know where they are being taken to when they click on the link.

You’ll know when something has a TITLE attribute specified because it will appear as a tool-tip when you hover over the link.

When it comes to links, the most important thing to keep in mind is that visitors to a website don’t like to be surprised about where a link will take them. They want to know where they’re going so that they can choose whether to follow that link or not. But you don’t necessarily need a TITLE attribute on every text link on your website. Only use them if the actual text of the link, or the surrounding context of it, is somewhat vague about where the visitor will be sent to if they click on it.

As with ALT attributes, there is still no agreement on whether they help you in SEO. Most web designers do agree though that they should be taken used as another one of the basic steps to make your website SEO-friendly. Just keep in mind that even if they are SEO-friendly, that doesn’t mean they should be abused. Specifically, you shouldn’t:

• Write the TITLE text with only the search engines in mind
• Use them to duplicate content elsewhere on the page
• Stuff them full of keywords that make them completely unhelpful

Here’s a simple way to understand how to write your TITLE attributes: write them so that they are descriptive enough to help your human users, and that should be enough to give you some SEO benefit as a result.

Images that are links

There is always some confusion about which attributes to use when an image is a link. Should you use an ALT attribute, a TITLE attribute, both, or neither, and if so, what should the text of those attributes be?

My answer to those questions is that it all depends on what the actual image is:

• If it contains a lot text – If the image contains text directing people to do something, then you should use both attributes – ALT text for the image and a TITLE attribute for the link. The text of both should be what the image says to do. For a good example, look at how I used these attributes on the “Enjoy this article” button at the bottom of this post.
• If it has only a few words of text – In this instance, your attributes will need to be a little more descriptive because the image itself isn’t. For example, if you have a nicely styled “Contact Us” button (as I do on the home page of this website), you need to be a bit more creative in how you write both attributes.
• If it doesn’t have any text – This is where you need to be the most creative, because the image itself doesn’t give you any guidance. In general, if you try to be as descriptive and action-oriented as possible, while perhaps incorporating one or two of your keywords, you should be golden.

Think before using

In general, you should use both elements when working on a website, but you need to be careful not to overuse them when it’s not necessary to have them. Good web designers know how to use these attributes, but great designers know when to use them – and that’s a big difference.

What are your thoughts on these using the ALT and TITLE attributes on websites? If you’re a web designer, do you use them in your designs? Do you think that the benefits are worth it, either in terms of the search engines, or from your users’ point of view? Share your thoughts with everyone by filling out the comment form below!

While there are many other advantages to building a website in WordPress, when it comes to SEO, WordPress is lacking in a few areas. I’d like to talk about one of those problems in particular: the inability to customize the META description and META keyword tags in the basic WordPress installation.

Optimizing META Tags in WordPress

So why is it not possible to customize the META tags on a WordPress website? It has to do with the META tags being located within the website’s header.

Websites that are built in a way where each page of content is a separate file make it easy to customize the META tags on the different pages. The header areas appear on every single page, and are each totally independent of one another.

But when a website is built in a system such as WordPress, that won’t work. WordPress uses only a few pages to display the page and post content, and all of those files reference the exact same header file. So with the basic installation of WordPress, there is only one header area throughout the entire website that you could customize.

Are you beginning to see the problem yet?

When you use WordPress right out of the box, yes, you are able to manually go into the header file and insert your optimized META description and META keyword tags into the coding. But that only solves the problem on the macro level. If you want to optimize on the micro level on every piece of content on your website, this becomes a more significant problem.

What’s the solution?

Whenever there is a problem in WordPress there is a plugin available to solve it, and this is no exception. The All-in-One SEO plugin allows you to write your own custom META description and META keywords tags on each and every page or post on your website.

Once you install it, the plugin will add a field called “All in One SEO Pack” onto the “Create” and “Edit” screens for all pages or posts. Just fill in that field with your optimized META description and META keyword tags, and when you publish your content, you’re good to go!

(Incidentally, this plugin is the most popular and downloaded plugin available for WordPress – so it’s something that a large number of people are successfully using and recommend.)

I just installed this plugin on this website, but have yet to go through my pages and blog posts and customize each the META tags for each one. I’m still debating whether it is worth it to customize every single blog post I’ve written, or whether I should only focus on categories or the most popular things I’ve written. No matter what I decide though, I think in the long-run it is worth taking the time to do.

While we’re in the header…

There is one other thing I want to mention quickly while we’re talking about the header, and that’s the ability to customize your title tags for SEO purposes.

Title tags also go in the header, and face the some limitations in WordPress that the META tags do. You could manually go into the header coding and set them to display the name of your page/post along with some keywords. The problem with doing it that way is that apart from the name of the page/post, the remainder of the title tag will be uniform across everything on your website.

If you want to have a greater degree of control over the title tags and would like to make the title tag more relevant to the content on the page, there are two plugins that allow you to do that:

• All-in-One SEO plugin (as mentioned above)
• SEO Title Tag plugin

Which one you use depends on whether you think that optimizing META tags is worth spending the time on.

A lot of SEO professionals think that the search engines don’t give as much value to META tags as they used to. In the early days of search, websites used to stuff their META keyword tags with a ton of keywords or keyword combinations in the hope that the search engines grasped onto some of them and directed traffic to the website. So those professionals say that the search engines learned from that, and stopped weighing those META tags as much in their search algorithms.

Whether SEO professionals are right about that is still up for debate. If you agree with the idea that META tags don’t carry much weight anymore, then you might not want to spend the additional time optimizing those tags throughout your website. And if you don’t have the need for it, then why install the all-in-one plugin when you could get by with the SEO Title Tag plugin instead.

The only downside to using the Title Tag plugin only is that you still need a META description on the pages of your website, because that is what is displayed on the search engine results page. So you would have to go into the header file manually and add in one.

Thoughts?

If you’ve used either one of the plugins mentioned above to optimize the META tags on your website, have they helped your search engine rankings? Do you think it’s worth taking the time to create custom tags for each page on your website or blog, or are there other SEO elements that should have a higher priority?

Share your comments using the form below!

SEO is not just optimizing your website for Google; there are other popular search engines used as well. (Although as anyone in the SEO world will probably admit, that’s not really true – it really is all about Google.)

I focus on Google here because they are unique in the variety of tools that they offer to help optimize a website for their search engines, a lot of which I have personally used for some of my clients.

Tips for Website SEO

Create a sitemap.xml file

A sitemap.xml file is a listing of the pages on your website in a format that is friendly to the search engines. You might be more familiar with a site map that is intended for humans to use; it’s the same concept, but the XML format is in the language that the search engine crawlers read.

There are a variety of tools out there to generate site maps for your website:

• Static HTML website – If you have a website that is static HTML pages, then you can use the free sitemap generator at XML-Sitemaps.com to generate one.
• WordPress website – I recommend using a great plug-in that I found called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It will generate and update a site map automatically for you.

Create a robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is a set of instructions that tells the visiting search engine crawlers what they can and can’t index on your website.

For example, you can give instructions to tell certain search engines not to crawl your website, or that all engines shouldn’t crawl a particular directory on your website. The most basic instructions tell all search engines that they can crawl all directories on your website.

When you subscribe to Google’s free Webmaster Tools, there is a tool that will create a robots.txt file for you. Once you create it, make sure that it goes in the root directory of your website.

Submit your URL

This one should be obvious, but it’s worth mentioning anyways. Submitting your URL to the search engines helps them find your website quicker – although sometimes it will still take some time after you submit it before the engines crawl your website.

At the bare minimum, you should submit your URL to the three major search engines. Here are the links for where you can do that:

• Submit a URL to Google
• Submit a URL to Yahoo
• Submit a URL to MSSN

Submit your sitemap

The same benefit as telling the search engines what your URL is applies to your sitemap as well – it will just help them find your website and content easier. From personal experience, Google makes it very easy to do – there is a tool within their webmaster tools that lets you do that.

Tips for Page SEO

Title tags

A page’s title tag is the first thing search engines look at when determining what a particular page is about. Title tags are also what potential visitors see and read when they’re looking at a search results page.

Most websites include the company name in the title tag, although there is still a good deal of debate about whether the name should be at the beginning or end of the title tag.

The most important thing to do with your title tags is make them relevant to what the page is about. It’s important to include one or two keywords in it as well, but don’t stuff your title tag full of keywords – that will just make your website look bad, and there are limits for the number of characters that can appear.

Header (H1, H2, H3…) tags

From the standpoints of usability, accessibility, and SEO, there are arguably fewer things that are more important than using your header tags properly. Not only do they visually break up your content on the page, but they also give users who are glancing through the page an idea of what is being written about.

How should header tags be used?

• H1 tags – Used for your main page title, to show what the page is about
• H2, H3, etc. tags – Used to break up your page copy, but also to show the search engines what the topics are on a page so that it can index your website properly

ALT and TITLE attributes

These two attributes don’t usually play a prominent role in the average user’s experience with a website, but they’re still important and shouldn’t be overlooked. There are also some small SEO benefits that can be gained from using them.

The ALT attribute is used when coding an image onto a page; think of it as some alternate text that appears should an image not load on a page. This attribute is important from an accessibility perspective because the screen readers used by blind people won’t show them what the image is, but if there is some descriptive text in the ALT attribute, they will pick up on that.

From an SEO perspective, the ALT attribute is another opportunity to get some code onto your page that the search engines will be able to read. Making it as relevant as possible to what the page is about can help contribute to stronger search engine rankings.

The TITLE attribute is usually used on links, and is often one of the small touches that a great website has. You’ve all seen the TITLE attribute in action even if you don’t realize what it is; if you hover over a link and a little tool tip appears, that’s the TITLE attribute in action.

From an SEO perspective, it’s again all about relevance, so be sure that what you’re putting in the TITLE attribute relates to where the link takes someone. Doing so will also help from a usability standpoint, which is just another added bonus.

Use META tags

Contained within the header of every page’s source code are what are called META tags. They are invisible to a website’s visitors, but are there because search engine spiders read them.

The two META tags that you need to concern yourself with the most when it comes to SEO are the description and keyword tags.

• The description tag is especially important because it is listed in your search result – it’s what users read when a link comes up and what makes them decide whether to click on the link or not. A well-written description should read like a sentence and should be a succinct summary of the page and what someone can find when on it. You don’t want to include as many keywords as possible, but be sure to write the description with a focus on the keywords that are relevant to that page.
• The keyword tag is still worth focusing some attention on, so be sure that you include at least a few relevant keywords in there – but again, don’t go overboard. Back in the early days of search, people used to stuff the keyword tags with anything and everything to improve their search engine results, and as a result, many search engines now just disregard the keyword tag.

Content is king

Want to know the most important aspect of SEO on a website? It’s the content. It always has been, and it always will be. You could use all of the tips mentioned above, but unless they are all relevant to the content on the page, then you’re just wasting time.

Yes, it’s true that most people will not read your content – but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it, because the search engine crawlers do read it and weigh it highly in their algorithms. The tricky part is that you also can’t write content that is entirely for the search engines, because real people need to read it and make a connection to it. There needs to be a balance between the two.

Here are some tips to help you write SEO-friendly content:

• Focus the content around a few keywords only – don’t try to include as many as possible
• Make sure that it reads well and makes sense from a human point of view
• Just write naturally and explain the information in terms most people will understand
• Keep it relevant to what people would expect to read on that page

SEO-practitioners often forget that the search engines are not the end unto themselves – they are only a tool that real people use to help them find what they’re looking for. So even if they can get the search engines to think that a page is great, it’s only as great as its ability to either keep people on the website, or to get them to make a purchase or complete a transaction of some sorts.

And in an interesting twist, yet another thing that the search engines factor into their algorithms is how quickly someone leaves your website from the search engine results that brought them there. This is just further proof that SEO can be summed up in one word, which I’ve already used repeatedly: relevance.

Thoughts?

These are some of the simpler steps that you can easily incorporate on your website. There are a lot more out there, so fill out the comment form below to share your best SEO tips, tricks, and tools with everyone!

Please only share SEO techniques that are considered “white hat” or ethical – no “black hat” or unethical tactics that can backfire and get you banned from the search engines. Thanks!