There are so many dos and don’ts when it comes to SEO, but there are also some key things to remember when writing your all important meta titles and descriptions, and it’s not just about keywords…

Search engines recommend a certain length title and description, and it’s important to stick to their recommendations as this is what the searcher will see on the google page when scanning the results, therefore anything over the word count is just a waste of typing!

Here are the key wordcounts:

1. Page title: 50-60 characters (seen below in blue)
2. Page description: 160 characters (seen below in grey)

Use these two areas to entice people on to your website, these are key pieces of information as this is what the user will see on google and therefore make their decision as to whether to visit your site.  It also needs to be relevant to the page it is linking to, otherwise the user may click through and exit again if they find the content isn’t what they were looking for.

This brings me onto the page content.

The key is relevancy, so think about the objective of the page  – what do you want the reader to learn from the content?  Create the content to answer their question. Each page should therefore be unique and have a unique meta title and description which all fit together to paint a clear picture.

When writing the page make it interesting, it is better that it reads well than stuffed full of keywords. A tip here would be to read the page out loud if it doesn’t sound right, re-write it!

Then there are images to think about

Before you upload images to your website, you should optimise them to a suitable file size – the smaller the better and name them according to the content using hyphens not underscores to separate words.

Once uploaded you should then give them an alt tag – this is a description used by screen readers for the visually impaired it also helps Google to categorise your image correctly which in turn can help improve your visibility on the image database of Google.

If you reference other products, services or pages in your new page, make sure you include a link. Internal links help to boost your SEO, but don’t go overboard. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing!

If you would like some help with your onsite SEO we can help, or you could attend our SEO course in September which will cover all of this information in more detail. Book here.