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If you haven’t realized it yet, a lot of important search engine optimization is going to go on inside your head. No were not talking about the one attached to your neck, although that’s true too. Here we are talking about the head section of each of your web pages. In fact, some very important information to search engines (SE) is contained in this section and how you use your head can make a big difference in how you eventually rank.The head section begins with the <Head> tag and includes everything through to the close </Head> of this tag. Now lets take a look at what might appear in the head.
<TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Information and Search Engine Marketing Services at Dew Point Productions</TITLE> <META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”Dew Point Productions provides search engine optimization, website promotion, search marketing consultation and website analysis.”> <META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”search engine optimization,search engine marketing,website promotion,seo consulting, website analysis”> <META NAME=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”> <LINK REL=”stylesheet” TYPE=”text/css” href=”hr-styles.css”> </HEAD>
More often than not, you’ll often find more code in the head section, but the above includes the components that you need to worry about and a little bit extra just for effect.
The first thing you see below the <HEAD> is the title which goes between the <Title></Title> tags. The words you write for this may be the most important words you will write for your entire website. Not only are they important to search engines, they are also the first thing that someone using a search engine comes to find out about your website as it is what gets underlined and displayed on search result pages (serps). The general rule is that this must contains your keywords (best not to have more than 2 or 3 at the most) and that those keywords should come towards the beginning. You can make the title as long as you want however, at some point SEs quit probably quit reading them and you are likely to dilute the importance of your keywords by having a lot of extra copy.
The next thing you should pay attention to in your head section is the meta description not too difficult to pick out above. Many search engines will use this as the text on the serp that goes just under the title. How often searchers pay attention to it is up for debate, but you want to put your best foot forward on this and give a readable and interesting description. At the same time you want to make sure that like the Title the keywords or keyword phrases are contained towards the beginning. Most people tend to scan rather than read entire blocks of text so you want to reinforce that they have found what they are looking for. And of course from a SE perspective, some of them may have a character limit for what they look at, the certainly do for what they show. Again, don’t dilute your keywords with lots of extra writing, but do write enough to ensure that is of interest and useful to humans.
Then comes the <Meta Name=”keywords”…. It is of some debate as to whether these mean much to search engines any more. Some SEs may completely ignore them. A quick scan of the top 10 results in google for Search Engine Optimization (on the day this tutorial was created) showed that 9 of the 10 results had keywords in their head sections. While not to much can be made of this fact it is interesting to note that both MSN and Google had results in the top ten. MSN’s page did have the keyword tag and keywords, however, Google’s did not. Google also didn’t have a meta tag for description on this result.
The above is where the thinking of many novice SEO types ends. The often never consider that there is another important seo element in the Head. This is the meta tag for Robots (you can also have a robots.txt file for this information). The robots tag tells search engines what they such things as whether or not they should follow the links on the page as in as in <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOFOLLOW”>. You can direct them not to index a page <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”>. Also, be aware that if you have a listing in the Open Directory Project (ODP) Google will use that description to go under your title unless you direct the Googlebot not to do so with <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”>. If you are confused about why you would want to do any of this see our tutorial on using the robot.txt for search engine optimization.
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