Asking these questions often means stepping outside of our role as designers and putting on a marketer’s cap, because ultimately that’s what a lot of this information is all about. Marketers focus on helping clients communicate with their customers, and that’s exactly what a successful website does.

People sometimes rely on our expertise as web designers without understanding that marketing is also an important part of what we do. If information about the target audience falls through the cracks, sooner or later the client might come to realize that their website isn’t doing as well as it should be. In their mind, that’s a reflection on your product and work as a web designer.

So put on your marketing cap, and ask your clients some of the following questions in order to design a website that will truly meet the needs of a particular target audience.

Demographic information

The most basic information you can get about a target audience is their demographic information. While it’s important that your client is happy with the website, you need to take into account basic demographic information in order to create a design that will make the website more successful.

Here are some basic demographic questions to ask about a target audience:

• What gender are they? – Knowing whether the target audience is male, female, or both makes a huge impact on your design decisions, mainly in what colors you choose. Men and women react differently to colors, and colors symbolize different things to age groups, professions, and ethnic or social groups.
• How old are they? – Generally speaking, different age groups may be more computer savvy than others, have different familiarities with finding or doing something online, and have different expectations about what functionality they’ll find on a website.
• What keywords are they searching for? – Knowing what keywords people are using to find the product (specifically) or search online for (broadly) is useful for SEO purposes. Ask whether the website is geared towards businesses, individuals, etc., and then use keywords based on their answer.

Content information

Visitors are coming to your website for some purpose, whether to find information, make a purchase, etc. While the colors and functionality of the website are important, the content is what they’re really looking for.

Here are questions that I ask my clients about the content expectations of their target audience:

• Why are visitors coming to your website? – Websites for businesses, organizations, and news media all have very different purposes. People come to each type of website looking to do something specific. Knowing what people are most often looking for will help you, as the designer, know what content to emphasize, how to structure the information architecture, and more.
• Why should they come back again? – Designing a successful website means that you’ve convinced people that it’s worth their time (and/or money) to visit the website again in the future. That means communicating some incentive to them, either through your products or through the information they can find on the website. Getting them to visit once is great, but getting them to come back is even better.
• What should they see on the homepage? – It’s always tough to prioritize what information should be seen on the homepage. Focusing on your target audience and understanding what they want quick access to should help make those decisions easier. Also keep in mind what the purpose of your website is, and what people are coming to your website for, to help prioritize what content should go on it.

Technical information

If I’m being hired by a client to redesign an existing website, I always check with them to see if they’re using an analytics program to track their website usage. Most of these programs also offer you information about the website’s visitors, which would be very useful to know when making some design decisions.

Here are a few questions that you should ask if you know that data is available from the current website:

• What kind of browser are they using? – What proportion of your visitors are using Firefox? Internet Explorer? Safari? This information might be especially useful to know if the target audience is largely using IE 6.0; if they are, then chances are you’ll have to find some workarounds for the inevitable programs with how your design will display.
• What are the most common screen resolutions? – Are they using 1280 x 1024? 800 x 600? Something in between. This information is useful because it will give you a sense of not only how wide your main content area can safely be, but of what proportions you can use in your design in order to let most people be able to see it so that it still looks nice.

Thoughts?

What other questions do you ask about a website’s target audience when you work with clients? Share your thoughts with everyone about this topic and anything else that comes to mind by filling out the comment form below!

Titles and sub-headers have the ability to not only break up your text into manageable chunks, but to engage your readers in what you’re writing about. Since people scan web content quickly, titles and sub-headers are what they’ll notice first – which is why they play such a big role in whether your content gets read or not.

Below are my tips for improving your content’s titles and sub-headers – recommendations that both web content writers and web designers can implement to make them more effective.

5 tips for the Web Content Writer

Writing great titles and sub-headers is easier said than done. It’s a skill that you need to develop as a writer, especially given the unique ways that people read content on a website. Here are some of tips for how to write more effective sub-headers in your web content:

• Keep them short and concise – Your goal should be to keep your titles and sub-headers to 8 words or less. At that limit, they will be long enough to make your point, but short enough so that they don’t wrap onto a 2nd line on the page based on how the designer has styled them.
• Strive for clarity, not creativity – You shouldn’t get so creative with them that people don’t know what comes below. Rather, sub-headers should convey information quickly so scanners can get an idea of what the content below is about without having to stop and think about it.
• Don’t re-state what comes below – When you can’t come up with an effective sub-header, the tendency is often to re-state what’s contained in the content below. That’s why writing great titles and sub-headers is a skill to develop – re-stating what comes below is the easy way out.
• Move the keywords forward – Put the keywords you’re writing about at the start of the sub-header for even greater emphasis. Scanners tend to notice only the first few words, so this will help emphasize what comes below in your content. (It can’t hurt for SEO purposes either.)
• Pose a question – Another way to get your readers to read your content is ask them a question within the sub-header that they’ll have to read the paragraph below to find the answer to. If you can do this effectively, it can be a great way to get people to look at your content.

5 tips for the Web Designer

Creating effective sub-headers isn’t just the content writer’s job. Web designers play a large role by giving the titles and sub-headers the visual qualities that will best capture the visitors’ attentions. Here are some design tips that you can use to make them more noticeable:

• Make them a different color – Rather than just making them plain black, choose a color from within your website’s color scheme to make them stand out. Go for a darker color though, especially on a white background, in order to give it enough contrast.
• Make them big and bold – You should always be able to tell what the headers are based on how big they are in relation to the rest of the content on the page. Make them bigger in size – enough so that were you looking at the page in black and white, you could tell what the sub-header is.
• Move the copy in – To make the sub-headers stand out even more, considering giving an indent to the rest of the content beneath them. An indent of 10-20 pixels should do – it will be subtle, but the effect is enough to give your content the desired visual separation.
• Keep the size proportionate to importance – Page titles should use the <h1> tag, which should always be styled the biggest; <h2>’s, <h3>’s, etc. should be used as sub-headers, and should all get smaller as you move further down the list.
• Keep the fonts simple – Since people are scanning, you don’t want your sub-headers to be styled in a fancier font that might take them longer to read and interpret. Style your sub-headers in simple, clean fonts like Arial or Verdana in order to make scanning as easy as possible.

Thoughts?

Do you have any common practices when it comes to either writing titles and sub-headers, or designing how they appear on the page? If so, share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

There are a variety of popular hosted search services available, such as Google’s Custom Search Engine, but the thing to keep in mind is this: no matter which one you choose, if your visitors can’t find the search field or it’s not very usable, it won’t do them, or you, much good.

So here are some tips for how to make your hosted search tool as usable as possible once you incorporate it onto your website – both for the search field itself and on the results page.

For the search field

• Use a search box with a type-in field – Let your visitors type in their search term right from the page that they’re on, rather than having them go to a specific search page to do it. Doing so makes the search more accessible and cuts out an unnecessary step from the search process.
• Style your search field appropriately – If the search field is too short, your visitors won’t be able to see the full search term they’re typing in. This is a problem particularly if they need to revise their term before searching. Avoid this problem and make the search field wide enough to contain multiple terms.
• Keep it in a consistent location – Your search function should be in as prominent and consistent a location as your website’s logo. I prefer either the right side of the header or in the main navigation area. The point is, visitors expect it near the top of the page, so make sure to put it there.
• Use an icon to emphasize its nature – Improve your website’s usability and make your search field more obvious by using an icon within your input field. A magnifying glass is the universal symbol for search, so use that to call attention to, and visually communicate the nature of, your search field.

For the search results page

• Limit the number of search results per page – If you have a lot of content being indexed, a large number of results might show up for certain search terms. Break the search results up into manageable chunks will help your visitors browse through them easier.
• Put a search box at the top of the search results page – This will make it easier for people to do another search should the results of the first one not be what they were looking for. You should customize the code a bit to make it look a bit larger than your regular search field.
• Have the term they searched for display in that search box - Having the searched-for term appear within the box on the results page when the results appear will further reinforce what they had typed in, and if they mistyped something and got wrong results, they’ll see what the mistake was.

Thoughts?

Do you use a popular hosted search tool on your website? If so, have you customized it to make it more usable for your visitors? If not, which of the tips mentioned above would you incorporate? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

(If you don’t know what breadcrumbs are and want to find out more about why and how to use them, read through my previous post on the subject, “Hansel and Gretel Would be Great Web Designers“.)

By adding some code

If you feel comfortable working with your WordPress theme’s files, here are 3 different ways to incorporate breadcrumbs into your WordPress website. Choose a method depending on what content you want to use them for on your website.

Simple breadcrumbs for individual blog posts

A post over at WP Hacks details how to make simple breadcrumbs menus using basic PHP template tags. All you have to do is insert the following code into the single.php file wherever you want the breadcrumbs to appear:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>">Home</a> &raquo; <?php the_category(); ?> &raquo; <?php the_title(); ?>

You can style this with CSS to make it look a little nicer; my recommendation is that you wrap everything in a list like as follows, which will give you more options when it comes to styling:

<ul>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>">Home</a></li>
<li><?php the_category('') ?></li>
<li><?php the_title(); ?></li>
</ul>

I include the code here because this method is so simple to use. I’ve used it before, and it serves it purpose if you only want to include the breadcrumbs on your blog posts. The only drawback is that there is no flexibility to use it anywhere other than the posts on your WordPress website.

Advanced breadcrumbs for both pages and posts

When you want to add breadcrumbs to more than just blog posts, you need something a little more advanced in order to do that. Here are 2 different methods; both incorporate more advanced code to display breadcrumbs on both pages and posts:

• How to: Breadcrumb function for WordPress
• WordPress Breadcrumbs

With both methods, you just have to copy and paste some code into your functions.php file, and then insert some PHP code into your theme’s files wherever you want the breadcrumbs to appear.

I haven’t tried either one of these out myself, so if someone has used them, or tries them out on their website, leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts.

By using a plugin

If you’re not comfortable editing the code in your WordPress theme’s files, there are plugins available that give you the ability to style and manage them through the WordPress admin section, such as:

• Breadcrumb NavXT
• Yoast Breadcrumbs
• Breadcrumb Trail by Justin Tadlock

I haven’t tried out any of these plugins myself, so I can’t speak from personal experience about how well they work or if one is preferable over another. If you have used one of them or have any feedback about these plugins (or others I didn’t mention), leave a comment about it below.

Thoughts?

Do you have a preferred way of creating breadcrumbs on your WordPress website? If so, share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

In the year or so that I’ve been in business for myself, I’ve continually looked to improve both my design abilities and how I communicate to potential clients the ways that my knowledge can benefit them. I’ve been making great progress on both fronts, but I’d really like to thank you especially, because it wasn’t until I saw your work that I became totally confident in my abilities in both areas.

A few months ago I approached the dental practice I go to with some thoughts I had about improving their website through a redesign. Their website at the time was in pretty rough shape and badly in need of improvement. The main dentist there told me that they had just contracted with you for the project, since you specialize in websites for dental practices. I wished him the best of luck on the project, and said that I looked forward to seeing their new website when it was ready.

I was thinking about that conversation this weekend. Since it had taken place 3-4 months ago, I figured that the new website would be launched by now. I did a quick Google search and confirmed that I was right – it had indeed been launched.

See, I specialize in creating custom websites for my clients that not only look great, but are also highly functional from both a usability and an SEO perspective. I like to talk to my clients and get a sense of who they are and what they need before I build them a website. I don’t think those are high standards to meet, and I thought that most other web designers shared a commitment to those ideas as well. But as I learned from seeing your work, that’s not always the case.

For a small business like this dental practice, the website that you gave them doesn’t truly meet their needs. I really believe that a redesign should be a big improvement over what it is replacing, but in this instance, I would even go so far as to say that it is a step backwards from their previous website.

Some of the things you did really stuck with me – in particular:

• Not taking advantage of their former #1 Google ranking for “dentist Chicago” - I’m sure you already know how difficult it is to optimize a website for generic keywords and have good results with them. Their previous website already already did that for them, even if those benefits weren’t intentional or they didn’t know how or why that was happening. Now, when you do a search for those terms, their practice isn’t anywhere near the first results page anymore.
• Not using their existing URL – For some reason the new website was created at a separate URL than the old one – www.their-website-url.com instead of www.theirwebsiteurl.com. But both URLs are still appearing in Google search results, so it will make people wonder which website is accurate. If I were some random person searching for a dentist and had to think about the difference between the two, you can bet I would just keep searching rather than stick around to find out the answer.
• Not creating a custom design - It’s very obvious after a few clicks through the website that the design is based on a template. That’s fine I suppose, although it’s not something I would personally choose to do for a client. On top of that, there are a lot of basic things that just look sloppy – such as the alignment on your list items, for example. Sloppiness can give people the impression that the business is unprofessional – which is probably not what they want to convey.
• Not understanding the role that colors have on a website - This particular dental practice markets itself as a dental spa. What that means, I’m still not quite sure, even though I’ve been going there for almost 4 years; I just know they offer a free shoulder massage after I get my teeth cleaned. But in any case, for a business that markets itself as such, I would have chosen colors that were much more reflective of what they are all about – perhaps colors that convey a sense of relaxation and ease, such as light blues and greens. I’m afraid that the dark purple and grey combination that you gave them just doesn’t give off that vibe.
• Not styling your links so it’s obvious what is a link and what isn’t - Website users associate blue words as links, so the way you styled words for emphasis in the headers and content gives the impression that those words are links, even if they aren’t. If you would have chosen another color for emphasis and used blue for your links instead of the dark red you used instead, it would have gone a long way towards making the text links as usable as possible.
• Not making it easy to find their address - You put “Northside of Chicago” in the top right area of the header, which is valuable real estate on a website. As a visitor, it’s good to have of where the practice is located in the city – but since the north side is somewhat/sort of a big area, it would have been more useful if you told me their address in that spot instead. Instead, you put the address in a place that’s more difficult to find and where I have to scroll down to find it.
• Not making the home page useful – Their business offers some unique services, so it would be useful to visitors to tell them on the home page what exactly they offer that differentiates theirs from a regular dental office. You could have put links to those services that they get the most business from, for example. Filling one-third of the home page with a lifestyle graphic strikes me as unnecessary, especially if you could could convey those emotions through a better design and color scheme, as I mentioned above.
• Not making it easy to find what it is they do - The procedures and services offered at their practice is why they’re in the business in the first place, so you want people to know about these things in as many ways as possible on the website. Making a list out of the almost 40 different things that are offered and only making it available from within the sidebar of their procedures section just doesn’t cut it. Neither does not alphabetizing or sorting the list in any way either. Next time, perhaps organize those links by categories or some other way to make it much more user-friendly.

Still with me? Good, because I’d like to thank you for everything that you did, however poorly it was done.

Why would I want to thank you for all of these things that I would do differently? It’s quite simple actually. As a web designer who is still perfecting my craft, it’s often helpful to get a sense of what not to do on a website so that I know what to do when I design my own. And by looking at your work, you just gave me the perfect example of what not to design when designing a website for a client.

Call me an idealist, but I believe that when we, as web designers, work with clients, we have a responsibility to deliver more than just the product that they are paying us for. We have a responsibility to really work with them so that they understand two main things – how:

1. Having a great website can really help their business
2. The unique knowledge that we have is necessary to achieve those benefits

That is the value proposition for why clients hire you. I know it’s mine, and it’s also why I am so committed to good design, usability, and SEO. All three are vital to a successful website, and a successful website can be vital to their long-term success. It’s up to us to incorporate these three concepts and to do a good job at doing so. I don’t know about you, but if I ever delivered a website to a client like the one that you delivered, I would not be able to call myself a professional any longer.

For my own success, I truly believe that being able to communicate these two points to our clients – and doing so in terms that they understand – is what really convinces people to hire me and what will ultimately make me successful as a web designer.

I hope that you feel the same way, and that you take these comments constructively as a way to improve the product that you deliver on future projects.

Sincerely,

Addicott Web

P.S. Next time I’m at the dentist, I’m going to follow up with them about their new website, and am planning to present some of my suggestions to truly improve their website. I hope I can show them that they don’t necessarily need to hire a firm specializing in a particular niche market in order to have a great website. They just need someone who is committed to creating a website that reflects their purpose and is fashioned with good design, usability, and SEO in mind. That is what will really benefit their business in the long run.

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!

But did you know that there is a whole lot more that Google can do other than just searching for words? There are a ton of neat tricks out there that people have discovered, some of which I’ve compiled here. Try some of them, and see if you’re able to Google more efficiently.

Tips and Tricks

Track Packages

You can track your UPS, Fedex, and USPS packages without having to visit their respective website – just input the tracking number in the search field.

Get the Local Weather

If you don’t want to wait for the weather on the 8′s on the Weather Channel, and don’t want to navigate through your local newspaper/TV station website, simply type weather “your ZIP code” in the search box.

Product Reviews

Do want to find consumer reviews for a product that you’re interested in buying, but you don’t want to be taken to websites that are trying to sell you those same products? Try typing “product name” sucks into the search field to get more accurate reviews.

What Time Is It?

Want to know the time anywhere else in the world? Simply type in time “city” and it should display the current time in that part of the world.

Movie Times

Want to go see a movie, but you don’t have the local paper in front of you to find out when it’s playing? Type in “movie title” “your zip code”.

Use as a Calculator

You can use Google as a calculator to answer anything from the simplest math to the most complex equation.

When entering your math, + is used to add terms, – to subtract terms, * to multiply terms, and / to divide terms. Besides these basic operators, you can use ^ to work out something to the power of something (for example, “2^4” would be 2 to the power of 4), and “sqrt” to calculate the square root of a number (for example, “sqrt 4” would be the square root of 4).

Track a Flight

Don’t want to go to your airline’s website to find out when your flight is departing or someone’s flight is arriving? Then just type in “airline” flight “flight number” and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google’s search results.

Convert Currency, Metrics, and more

Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you’re cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or more. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (type in “quarter cup in teaspoons”) or how many seconds there are in a year (type in “seconds in a year”) or how many euros there are to five dollars (type in “5 USD in Euro”).

Dictionary Definitions

By typing in “define” before a word, Google will display a list of dictionary definitions for that word.

Other Tips

• Phrase the question you are typing in the search engine in the form of an answer. For example: Instead of typing in, “What is the average rainfall in Chicago?” you might want to try typing, “The average rainfall in Chicago is”
• Place quotes around phrases that must be searched together. For example: If you put quotes around the words, “baseball hat” Google won’t waste your time by looking for Web pages with the words “baseball” and “hat”.
• Google is a global White Pages and Yellow Pages. Type in phonebook “business name” “city, state”, and Google will automatically display the address and phone number.

Suggest Your Own

Have tricks for using Google that you think others would find useful? Share with everyone by commenting below!