When engaging in SEO or optimizing your site for search, think about the visitors or the people you want to reach. Thinking of your visitor and the searcher will help you capture more traffic from search results.
As a site owner, it’s easy to get wrapped up with what you would like things to look like or say. Sometimes you may think it’s not necessary to have a bit of contact information in a particular place because it might take away from the aesthetic appeal of the site. Or, you might want to get creative with your navigation and layout. Let’s not make things difficult for your visitor though.
On the other side of the coin is a site owner that thinks in order to rank for a particular phrase, it needs to be everywhere possible on the page, in the title, in the headings, in almost every sentence, in the alt tag, and in your face! To add insult to injury, the site owner may surround this phrase by other useless filler content. Let’s not insult your visitor’s intelligence here.
There are quite a few variables in SEO that result in getting your pages, content, and site to show up higher in search results. A typical checklist will usually only address the basics and you can find thousands of those types of checklists all over the web. Beware of what you put your faith into though. Most of that stuff is outdated or incredibly basic.
I found a great example on how to handle one particular SEO tactic in a way that meets the human visitor’s need. It describes how to write Meta tags so that you look way better in search results, increase that likelihood for a click through which all leads into your properly set up marketing funnel.
This is just one small thing I work to improve upon with my clients. The Meta description and title tag are not something you will see on your web page. But, when someone does a search in Google, Bing, or Yahoo, it is what will show up alongside every other web page or site that is also optimized for that search term.
While this is good practice today, do not be alarmed when the next big search algorithm update totally ignores these items and decides to start pulling data from some other place within your site. As I said, there are many variables to search and it tends to change frequently. This is one reason to have a good SEO specialist working with you.
For now, writing title tags and descriptions for your visitor is good practice and will enhance how you stand out on the search results page and attract the click thru because you are a more obvious choice in the midst of all other results on the page.
Here is a screen shot from the article I have referenced on writing these title tags and descriptions:
Let’s get to the logistics here. If you are using a WordPress built site and installed the tried and true All-In-One SEO plugin, then this is as easy as telling your Facebook friends on Friday that it is in fact Friday and you are so happy that it is Friday and if they didn’t know….. Friday means the weekend is about to begin! Please don’t do that by the way… it’s annoying.
Back to the topic at hand; on each page and post of your site, simply fill in the title and description fields of the All-In-One SEO plugin with the proper data. The plugin even tells you how many characters are recommended along with how many you are using up. It’s kind of a no brainer!
The more challenging part that takes more thought and research is coming up with what should go in those fields.
Start with your keyword research. Keep to the idea of one main keyword phrase per page. Work that one phrase into your title and into your description. Make it readable, sensible, and actionable. Ask yourself, what is this page about? What is the shortest way to describe what is on this page that will make a searcher want to click through to learn more?
When you nail this down, the exact result of doing SEO for your visitor is that you effectively capture more traffic from search results with a click through and convert that visitor to a new subscriber, follower, or customer.
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