The meta keywords attribute has been around for quite some time. Unfortunately, too many webmasters were using this feature incorrectly by adding keywords that were unrelated to the content on their site. As a result, the meta keywords tag became less and less reliable. Nonetheless, it still exists, and there has been some speculation that some search engines still do take it into account. Therefore it only makes sense for us to include our keywords in them.
Putting in our meta tags is very simple. This process is going to be very similar to the page description process. Press the Page Info button, and make sure you are on the header tab. Press the ‘Plus’ button, and under the Name heading, type in ‘Keywords.’
In the content section, type in your keywords. Remember to separate each keyword or phrase with a comma. Do not add keywords or phrases which are irrelevant to your page. Keep this section to a minimum. Adding a bunch of keywords and phrases will not help your efforts. As an example, if this page was about left handed golf clubs, it wouldn’t make sense to add the phrase ‘Right handed golf clubs’ in the meta keywords. It would be more appropriate to save that phrase for your right handed golf clubs page.
The description tag is a place where you can give a quick description of what is on your webpage. This isn’t a place to just pack in some keywords, but it is a great spot for you to write one or two sentences that really describe your page. It can also be thought of as a way of selling users on coming to your site. The reason for this is that sometimes, your description will show up in search engine results, right below the title tag here. So as you can see, this little blurb here reads “At Lefties Only, left handed golf clubs are our specialty.” If I were to click to go to this site, and then view the source code, we can see that that blurb actually came straight from the meta description. This isn’t always the case, but you have seen first hand how important it is to have a great description.
To change your page description in RapidWeaver, highlight the page that you wish to update, and click on the Page Info button. Ensure that the Header tab is selected. The next thing you are going to do is press the ‘Plus’ button which is located on the right hand side of the window, almost half way down. In the name field, type the word ‘description.’ In the content field, type in your desired page description. Remember to make the description enticing enough for visitors to be interested in going to your website and learning more. Since every page on your website is unique, so should each page’s description. Keywords are in bold in the search engine snippet when they match up with the users search query, so make sure to use good keywords in your description
The title tag is one of the most important elements for search engine optimization. The title tag consists of the words and phrases found at the top of your web browser when you are visiting any given website. It is also what is shown as the first line when you are doing a search engine search.
The title tag should contain your most important keywords. Some of the biggest mistakes we see when it comes to title tags are seeing titles that simply read “Home,” “Welcome,” or some other non-descriptive term. Another mistake is having just your company name as the title tag. Unless you are a company such as Nike or Pepsi for example, your company name alone, should not be in your title tag. The reason for this is that in your online business venture, you are trying to gain customers who have might not be aware of your existence. If they don’t know your business exists, how will they know to type your business name in a search query? You still should put your company name in your title tag, for branding purposes, or to make it helpful for the users who do know your company name to find your site. Just make sure that you order them properly by having keywords first, followed by the company name.
The title tag is located near the top of each page in the “head” tags. Google will only show up to about the first 70 characters in its results, so as mentioned earlier, make sure that your most important keywords are near the beginning of your title. Do your best to make each page on your site have a unique title. The title should also be very relevant to the content on the actual page.
To change your title tags in RapidWeaver, highlight the page on the left hand side, and press the Page Info button. In the field that says browser title, type in your desired title tag. Remember to use all of the tips mentioned earlier when creating your title tag.
So how do you know if you’ve created a good title tag? Well your best option is to try it out for a few months, and see if anything is going on with your rankings. If nothing has really improved, it might be time to change them up. If you are going to change them, make sure that you are not changing title tags on pages that currently do have rankings. You will risk ruining those rankings.
When it comes to placing links on our page, the anchor text, or the phrase that you can click on that takes you to the destination page, plays a far greater role than most people imagine. For example, let’s do a Google search for the term “click here.” You will notice that the first result is for Adobe Reader. No where on the Adobe site does click here appear, yet it ranks number one for the term. The reason for this, is because many other websites, including very high authority sites such as educational institutions, link to this exact page, and the anchor they use is “click here.”
I want to show another good example of anchor text that will really illustrate how the anchors influences the results in searches. As you can see here, this particular anchor is actually a typo. Instead of typing AppTorial, this webmaster accidentally typed in AppToria. Also take note of the destination URL for this link. Let’s see what happens when we search for the term AppToria in Google. You will notice that in the results, the exact page that had the link for AppToria appears. No other page on the AppTorial site appears for this search term.
When you make your site, keep this SEO tip in mind. When you link to other pages on your website, avoid using common phrases like click here or anything similar to it. Instead, use some of the keywords and phrases that you have written down. So for example, if I want to send my users to my page that talks about left handed golf clubs, I will type in “left handed golf clubs” highlight the string of text, right click and select Add Link. Then, I will link to the appropriate page on my site.
Many webmasters forfeit potential traffic by not properly naming their images. It is very common to see images labeled as ‘img’ followed by a bunch of numbers. By doing this you can lose out on potential traffic from image searches. Google Images is an example of an extremely popular image search engine. By using our keywords and phrases in our images, it gives us another opportunity for getting noticed by search engines for those particular words and phrases. So as an example of image names, this folder shows you what we want to avoid using with our images. This folder shows you examples of good, keyword rich image names. This is not one of the most critical aspect of your SEO campaign, but it certainly will not hurt you to give your image files descriptive names. You may be pleasantly surprised by the amount of traffic you can gain by this simple tweak.
For those who’s business targets a local customer base, it is always a great idea to include the cities or towns that your business serves, somewhere on your site. This will assist you in coming up in searches where the users types a key-term as well as a city or town name. There are many different ways you can do this. You can include your address in the footers, the city or town names in the title tag, and even a Contact Us page that has a more detailed section of where you operate and which cities or towns you serve. We will be discussing the footers, and title tags later in on the video.
The content you place on your site will have a large impact on your search engine rankings, as well as your ability to obtain incoming links. Each page on your site should contain content in the form of text. Ideally, you should have about 250 to 500 words on each page. In that text, you should make it a point to include the key-terms that relate to that specific page. Do not overload the text with those key-terms too many times, but use them when it is appropriate to do so. Within your text, it might also be a good idea to link to highly regarded sites that are relevant to what your page and key-terms are about. This allows search engines to relate the pages you link to with the content on your site.
A blog is a fantastic place for you to add some content to your website without having to create another page. Adding content on your blog adds freshness to your site, and shows search engines that the site is still being looked after. Search engines put a lot of emphasis on the natural growth of content on a site. So adding new content to your site, will over time improve its search engine ranking.
When writing your content, keep in mind that you should always avoid having duplicate content on your site. This means no copying and pasting articles from other sites, and no taking your past articles and simply re-wording them. Remember to write content for your users, and not for search engines. Like mentioned earlier, overloading the text with key-terms will be annoying to your users. Lastly, make sure you double check your spelling and grammar. This is very important because this could influence your link-ability.
Navigating through a website should not be a difficult task. Find out how to make your site easier to navigate for your users, while making it more friendly for search engines.
Video Transcript
This optimization is very simple and easy to accomplish. When it comes to the navigation of a website, there is nothing search engines like to see more, than a nice structural and consistent navigation menu.
What this means, is that your navigation menu should flow from page to page within your site. There shouldn’t be any differences in your navigation menu on any page on your site. A good navigation menu also includes proper keyterms linking to pages relevant to each of the keyterms. In other words, the keyterm is not misleading to any user who might click on it. Google likes it when websites have a natural flowing hierarchy that makes it easy for users to go from one page to the next. Making your users click several times before landing on the page they want is not the right approach to take.
Google also likes a breadcrumb navigation, which looks like this; This is a row of links which allow users to easily navigate back to the previous page, or to a page which is more than one back click away. These breadcrumb navigations can be helpful to your users and are best placed at the top or bottom of each page.
Navigation menus are very easy to edit in RapidWeaver. Simply click on the page, and then press the Page Info button. Then type your new page name in the Page Title field. You will want to make sure that these keyterms are not excessively long, and that they are not misleading. In addition, some pages won’t require you to make new keyterms. For example, a contact might not need to have a keyword in the navigation menu. Leaving it as Contact, or Contact Us will suffice.
There is also a breadcrumb feature in RapidWeaver that we can also turn on. Press the Setup button, and select the Advanced tab. There you will see an option to display breadcrumb trails. Click on the tickbox to activate the breadcrumb trails. You will notice that the breadcrumb trails appear at the bottom of each page.
In the first lesson of the on-page optimizations section, we will discuss a commonly overlooked place to insert your keywords. Remember to register to view the entire RapidWeaver SEO course, and to ensure you are watching the most updated video tutorials.
Video Transcript
If we take a look at what we see in our address bar here, we see this site’s domain, which is rockbottomgolf.com. If we look directly beside the domain name, we see “golf swing trainers and practice aids.” The latter part of that address is what is known as the page filename. Page filenames are a fantastic place for us to include our websites keywords. Unfortunately, many webmasters make the mistake of not taking advantage of this opportunity. You will notice how this particular address is not painfully long, has dashes separating the words, and is very clean looking. This page name makes it much easier for search engines to understand what this particular page revolves around. If we compare this address to one that looked something like this, we can really get a good idea of how search engines would have an easier time categorizing this page.
It’s typical to see webmasters naming their page files with generic names such as page1 or homepage. Our goal is to utilize every option we have for incorporating our keywords into our website. Whenever you create a new page, make sure your file is given a keyword rich name.
If you already have pages with poor filenames but are actually successful with search engines, do not change the filename as this will ruin your ranking. Just be sure to apply this optimization tip in the future.
To name your files, highlight the file in the Webpages navigation on the left. Then press the Page Info button, and where it says Filename, type in your new page file name. Try to use a key-term that is greater than one word, and less than 6 words in length. Remember to use dashes to separate each word. It is important to note that your homepage’s filename will be index.html. Do not rename this page. Just leave it as is.
In the first of two tutorials for the Planning Stage of our SEO process, we are going to discuss how to choose proper keywords, and an easy way to organize them. Remember to visit video course page, which will have all the tutorials outlined in a very organized manner.
Video Transcript
The reason we are starting with keyword research is because we will be using our keywords throughout all three stages. So to begin our keyword research, open up your web browser and go to google.com. Next, type in the search phrase “google keyword tool” and click on the first result, which should be the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool.
This will take us to the Google AdWords keyword suggestor tool. Type in the Captcha if the popup box appears for you. In the box that tells you to enter your word or phrase, type in a keyword or two that you think most closely relates to the content on your site. As an example, I will type in golf clubs.
After just a few seconds, a long list of potential keywords shows up. Let’s start with the first keyword we see. To the right of this keyword, we see that there is a green bar under Competition. What this means is that this particular key-term has many advertisers competing for top placements in the sponsored links section of a Google search. A key-term with not as much green in its advertiser competition bar will not have as many advertisers competing for the sponsored links section. What this indicates to you as you are creating your web site, is that targeting a key-term with high competition may be an extremely tough challenge, and as a result, you may find more success targeting a key-term with not as much competition, which would be indicated here by a smaller amount of green in its bar.
I’m going to just pause this demonstration of Google’s keyword tool, to show you a good way of double checking that the competition is in fact low. So let’s assume that the keyword I have found with low advertiser competition, and a high search volume is “golf tour club.” I will go to google, and search for this term. The first thing I will notice, is the number of results. This term actually has a relatively high number, so that might indicate to me that this term may be too competitive. The next thing I will do, is check out the sites that rank highly for this term. What you want to be asking yourself, is whether or not these sites are of high quality or low quality. If they are high quality sites, this is another indicator to you that this phrase may be hard to compete for. If they are low quality sites, then thats when you might decide to target this phrase. To figure out if they are high or low quality sites, it will have to be a judgment call by you, but you can visit the site, and see if it is professionally done, and then also see if it is a site that has a lot of incoming links, or even see if it has a high page rank. We will learn more about incoming links and page rank later on in the video. For now, let’s get back to Google’s keyword tool.
Beside the advertiser competition is the Global monthly search volume. This number is based on an average of the global monthly google searches for each key-term performed over a 12 month period.
The figure beside the Global monthly search volume is the Local monthly searches. This number is based on the 12 month search average for your targeted country and language. The search I am showing here is targeted for the United States, and English.
Finally, the Local Search Trends bar graph shows the monthly fluctuations in searches for this term. It is also based on your targeted country and language.
Another cool feature that Google has added to the keyword tool is the availability to sort the keywords. On the right side of your page, you should see a drop down menu right beside the words Sorted by. The default will be set to Relevance, however, you can change it to any of the options you see here such as keyword, competition, and global monthly searches.
As we scroll down the list, you will begin to see all of the other suggested related terms, along with their advertiser competition and search volume. It is highly recommended that you spend some time going over some of these key-terms, creating new ones, and figuring out some good terms that you can use that are still highly searched, but do not have as much competition associated with them.
When you see phrases that you like and want to use, click on the check box which is located on the far left side of the keyphrase. Repeat this for all keywords that you want to target. Once you are done, you can download these keywords. Click on the button that reads Download and choose Download Selected. Choose whichever format you’d like, and download your keywords. Keep this list handy as you will be referring back to it throughout your optimization.
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