A lot of people may not realize that the Head section not only presents an opportunity to tell the search engine what the page is about, but also an opportunity for conversions. The content you write in the Head section renders as your title and description in the SERPs.
So there’s not only some science to it, but it’s also a marketing tool. Make sure you’re making the best use of that real estate on the results page to pull your potential visitors into the page. I wrote an article on the ins and outs of Meta data once, check it out for more detail on how to tackle the Head section.
Meta data – Title tag: Length six to 12 words, not including stop words such as “a,” “and,” “but,” “for” and so on. Remember, Google cuts off the title in the SERP at approximately 70 characters including spaces. If a company has a strong brand, consider putting the brand name at the front of the Title tag. This could increase click-throughs by associating trust with the brand over other results in the SERP. If the brand is not yet built up, consider putting the brand name (or brand name domain) at the end of the Title tag.
Meta data – Description tag: Best practices is to ensure the important keywords show up in the first 156 characters of the description tag so when the description renders in Google SERPs, those important keywords are showing. Google cuts off the description in the SERP at about 160 characters including spaces.
Meta data – Keywords tag: Even though Google has said it does not consider the Keywords tag in its Web search, we include it as a “nice to have.” This is because signals have pointed to it as serving a purpose in optimization with regards to relevance. The methodology at BCI is to put the keyword phrases in the tag in order of word length and to use title case on each word. Include the brand’s name in the Keywords tag as well in the appropriate place within the tag based on how many words it contains.
Meta data tips: Symbols like the ampersand (&) actually add more characters than using an “and” instead. Usually, the goal is to minimize the character count in order to fit important keywords in before the character cutoff in the SERP.
During Optimization: The Body Section
First things first, the body content must fulfill the promise of what you have told both users and the search engines what the page is about in the Head section. Aside from providing solid, quality content on the topic, adding keywords throughout further clarifies the topic of the page. Here’s some tips for optimizing the body content:
Primary keywords placement: Place the primary keyword or phrase in the header (the H1 Heading tag) and first sentence of body copy. This is among the first content on the page the search engine and the user encounters (aside from the information in the Head section) and further gives clarity as to what the page is about.
First 200 words: Place all the keyword phrases for the page and all the tilde words for that page in the first 200 words of body copy (and then linearly distributed throughout). This is assuming you have a fairly targeted list of keywords for that page. You wouldn’t want to try and stuff a ton of keyword phrases upfront if it’s going to feel spammy. Remember, there is a fine balance between providing information and being natural.
Tilde words distribution: As with keywords, tilde words should be linearly distributed in proximity to the keyword phrase throughout the page.
Keyword phrase composition: Unless otherwise noted, try not to break up keyword phrases with excessive amounts of words in between (stop words don’t count, for example, “but,” “and,” “to” and so on, as those are automatically stripped by the search engine when it reads the page.). No words in between is preferable unless it’s an awkward string of words; in that case, it would be unnatural sounding to not use it in conversation style.
Links: Typically, we wouldn’t link to other pages until after the first 200 words. Since we think of the first 200 words as being the most important to conveying to the search engine what the page is about, linking out to another site is something you can do a little later in the copy. When the time is right to link out to other pages in your site, a good SEO practice is to make sure the anchor text of the link contains the primary keyword phrase of the page it’s linking to.
Images: Make sure any images on the page have descriptive ALT attributes that explain what the image is and contain keywords appropriate to the image. If the keywords are both appropriate to the image and the content on the page, that’s a bonus.
