What Search Crawlers Look At
Keyword engineering consists of the hypothesizing, testing, & refinement of the textual content used on-site with respect to optimizing for search engine crawler consumption. When optimizing your website for organic search rank it is important to consider all of these elements as variables in the search authority equation. Your search engine results page (SERP) rank depends on the authority and weights associated with the URL, Page Title, Meta-tags, on-page content, & usage data of the page itself so each of these component contributes to the overall quality asserted by search engines. Since usage data (time on site, bounce rate, pages viewed) enhancements are really a side effect of quality user experience enhancements, we’ll focus just on the text-based variables in this post.
SEO Friendly-URLs
Beyond root domain authority, creating a URL structure for your website that aligns target content with traffic-driving keywords is one of the best ways to increase your website’s authority for specific keyword phrases. Use tools like Google’s Keyword Tool to find out what people are actually searching for and organize your URLs for better ranking.
Page Titles for SEO
Since page titles are the primary information and anchor linkage text in most search engine result listings, it is crucial that they are optimized and properly describe their respective pages. Like most text-based variables in search, the authority for any given keyword in a page title is computed based on percentage of the total title string and it’s starting position within the title string. This means for the keyword “SEO” the following page titles would rank in the following order: “SEO Company”, “The Best SEO”, “The Best SEO Tips”. The density parameters for page titles vary depending on the keyword phrase.
Meta-Tags
Meta-tags are HTML elements contained within the head of the page. Two of these that are used by search crawlers to determine the contents of the page are page description and keywords. Keywords were once highly considered by search engines for authority but now due to improvements in full-text crawling performance are largely downplayed for the actual textual content of the page. The description is displayed underneath the title hyperlink on most popular SERPs and used for keyword authority assignment so it is important to exude consumer confidence and authority with this tag.
On-page Tagging Structure
In general, headline tags (h1,h2…h6) should be used for outlining a framework for the page’s content – much like chapter titles within a book. Typically search engines decrement any page with multiple h1′s, but other h tags can be used multiple times within a page without consequence. These tags can be used to highlight tieriary keyword phrases supplementary to the primary target included in the URL or page title.
Optimized Content
Search engines are continually putting more emphasis on usage data for qualifying authority. This means providing useful web content, resources, & other information on your site that engages new users and commands a retentive audience is increasingly important in your overall web marketing strategy. Use data tracking and analysis to capture which keyword phrases are driving qualified traffic and provide content for those users.
If you’d like to continue the dialog about keyword engineering and it’s place within a thorough online visibility strategy, please contact us anytime
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