Search Engine Optimization Services

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Video Transcription:

Hi, I’m Liz Maritz with The Net Impact. We’re going to be talking about search engine optimization. I think a great starting place is to distinguish the difference between search engine marketing, or SEM, and search engine optimization, or SEO. Search engine optimization is actually a part of search engine marketing. Search engine marketing can encompass a lot of other tactics that don’t fall under SEO, like PPC and display ads.

There are also many facets to SEO, as well. It’s important to know what those facets are. We have keyword research, meta data and a variety of other things. Today we’re going to be focusing strictly on meta data, but I wanted to include keyword research because it’s extremely important not to start filling out your meta data before you’ve executed a really well thought out and well researched keyword research campaign.

We can talk all about that The Net Impact. We know a lot about keyword research, and we can definitely help you with that, as well.

Today, let’s dive into meta data. Meta data consist of keywords that you list on your page, your page’s description, headings, alt text for images and title tags for your page. Now, it’s important to know that all this meta data is behind the scenes. If you are looking at a webpage, you’ll not see any of this meta data actually rendered on the page that the consumer, or that your web visitor sees. It’s all in the background and it’s all for the search engines.

First of all: keywords. Keywords are very important to meta data. You want to make sure that after you do your keyword research you’re applying the best keywords that are focused to your page, not too broad, not too overly specific. You want to make sure that you use a lot of those to attract visitors to your page. The two things to remember about keywords are that you have an unlimited number of space - but don’t abuse it - and you want them to be focused to your content.

Next is the description. The description is what will actually show up in your search results snippet, as Google calls it. The description is your search result. You’ve got the search right here, and you’ve got the listing, 1, 2, 3 listing. This is your snippet. Now, it used to be that the descriptions would show up exactly as you had entered them into the snippet, but now Google will pull from a lot of different areas to create that snippet. If you have a really well-written description, a lot of that description should show up in the snippet.

Headings. You’ll see headings in your source code. One of the things that a lot of people do for search engine optimization is they’ll check source code. All you have to check source code is control click, or right click on the page and you have the option to view source code, and you can see all of the code that’s behind your website, which includes the meta data. Headings will be listed in your source code as H1, H2, H3. These are all really important because they basically tell Google what the hierarchy of your content is. H1 is more important than an H2, is more important than an H3. A lot of the times, they’re headings, they’re bolded, so they show how your content is organized on your website.

We also have alt text for images. There’s a little debate about how to do alt text, and I know even among the team here we might have a little disagreement about what exactly alt text should be. Let’s say you’ve got a picture right here. We’re going to - you know, don’t judge my art skills - but, we have a tree with a sunrise in the background. Well, typically, alt text is supposed to describe exactly what that image is. It’s basically describing the image. It’s not giving any additional information about it. The alt text would be tree at sunrise.

Now, a lot of times, there’s a deeper meaning to that image than just what it shows in the physical sense. So, there’s also another meta data field that you can add to an image. It’s the long description field. In the long description field you can provide more info about that picture. Maybe this is a tree at sunrise right before a rainbow appeared over the Grand Canyon. That would be where you could add content that would maybe connect that image specifically to the content on your page.

Title tags: this is a big one. A lot of the search engines will use different lengths of title tags. You want to keep your title between 60 to 70 characters. You might want to do a little research on these. There’s a lot of speculation that title tags are changing, that Google is changing how they create title tags for pages.

Typically, title tags were given a lot of weight in search engine rankings and they were used to basically determine the content of the page. Now, there’s evidence that Google is possibly creating title tags with additional information from H1s and descriptions. They may be updating title tags or adding title tags where there were not title tags before. So, there’s a lot of discussion going on in the SEO community about that right now.

Some companies will create title tags for their pages and they’ll render exactly as they listed them, and other companies will create title tags and they’ll show up slightly different than how they had them on their page, or even completely different. So, that’s sort of a controversial item right now, but just keep your eyes open to see how that discussion progresses.

What else is there? We have basically all of your main meta data listed out right here, but what else can influence your SEO? Well, because of how Google is now creating new snippets, it’s increasingly important to make sure that you have good content on your page and make sure that you have a great website information architecture. Basically what that means is when someone visits your page, make sure that it’s really easy to find the content that they’re looking for, your navigation’s very intuitive. A lot of that comes through a wire framing process, and we do a lot of that work here at The Net Impact.

Other things you might look at are ADA compliance for those with disabilities who might be looking at your website. A big part of that is having your alt tags filled out, but there’s also a lot more that goes into ADA compliance, as well.

You want to make sure that you are minimizing your validation errors, as well. So, if you have a 404 error, page not found, you want to make sure that you’re going through and checking your website and that all of your links lead to a good page and that everything is well-connected on your website.

Finally, your URL: that’s probably one of the hardest things to change because you have to register a new domain. Make sure that when you’re starting a webpage, or if you’re redoing a website and you can potentially change the URL, make sure that your URL still fits exactly what you want for your content and that your URL, in and of itself, will be intuitive to people and they’ll know exactly what to expect to find on your website.

That’s about it for our discussion of search engine optimization. If you need any additional assistance with search engine optimization or search engine marketing, please contact The Net Impact. We’d be happy to help.