After you have written your content, and your keywords have the appropriate density, your work isn’t quite over. You need to make sure that not only does the content look good on your website, but also make sure that it has the appropriate internal optimization. There are several aspects to making sure that your site is optimized on the inside, tagging is an important one.
What Are Tags?
There are several different areas where you will want to tag your content. These tags are done where people can see them (such as in the article tags) and where they are not seen (such as in meta tags). Essentially what these tags do is help the search engines know exactly what your content is all about.
Article Tags
While these tags do provide a few more words for the web crawlers to grasp, the primary focus of article tags are to help the reader navigate to pages that have similar content. For example, if your website deals with all sorts of amphibians, then you will want to tag some pages of content with “frogs” and others with “salamanders” and still others with tags that pertain to that area of focus. As a reader I want to learn more about frogs, so I can select the frog tag and I will be given a list of all the pages that pertain to frogs.
Image Alt Tags
A small way that you can boost the SEO value of your page is to make sure to tag your image. The search engines have not yet adapted to understanding what an image is all about without a text description. So if you have the most amazing picture of a sunset over the Rocky Mountains posted, but the file name is DSC11010 and there is no caption, description, or alt tag, then there will be no way for a search engine to find that picture (except for the content of the page). By putting in an alt tag (done when you upload the image) that contains your focus keyword, you will help the search engines track your site more effectively.
SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions
When you Google a topic, you will see a list of results. Underneath the page title there is a short description of what that page is all about. Sometimes, however, that description is just a chunk of text from the beginning of the page. In order to have a clean block of text, you will need to have a meta description. Since this is delving a little deeper into the “meta” portion of website building, an aspect that many people are not familiar with, I leave this up to a plugin. I prefer WordPress SEO by Yoast. This simple plugin makes my life so much easier by putting all the tags and optimization into one area for me; I wouldn’t be able to do my SEO work without it. More to come on Yoast in the future.
Optimizing Your Pages
Keywords are important. But so is making sure that you are tagging your pages in the right places not only to help with your search engine ranks, but also to help your reader find their way around your website. You should know what tags to add, and how to appropriately use them. Doing so will bring in new readers that can easily navigate their way around your website.
Sound like more work than you want to put into your site? No problem, as a writer in Billings, Montana my entire career is built around this sort of thing. Email me or call me at 406.860.4407 to learn more about how I can help create content and optimize it for your website.