Search engine optimization, or SEO, can confuse the average person. What makes search engines work? Why do some blogs and websites rank higher than others? Is it even possible to rank a website higher than Google’s top results? To answer all these questions, it’s important to understand some basic terms used in search engine optimization. These seven terms may help you understand the basics of what’s going on behind the scenes when you type something into Google and click Search.
A meta description is a brief description of a webpage that appears in search engine results. It is essential to have a well-written meta description as it can help persuade people to click through to your website. The meta description should be about 30 words or less and tell what a person will find on your site if they decide to visit. It should not include keywords because those are usually reserved for keyword searches. Meta descriptions are also used with social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., so make sure you create one and update it often with fresh content.
A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. They should be unique to each page to provide clear context about what content you will find when you follow them. The best practice is to use sentence case in your title tags: capitalize the first letter of each word except for words like the or of.
One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is anchor text. This is the text on a web page that links to another page. The anchor text tells the search engine what the page being linked to is about. When choosing anchor text, you want to use keywords that accurately describe the page you’re linking to. That way, you can help improve your site’s ranking in search results. However, you also want to be careful not to overdo it. Using too many anchor texts or keywords that are not relevant to the page’s content could backfire and result in negative effects like lower rankings or even getting penalized by Google. If you need help with your website’s SEO, an experienced London Ontario SEO agency would be able to provide sound advice and valuable insights.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term nofollow link, it’s a link that doesn’t pass along any link to the site it’s linking to. In other words, it doesn’t help that site’s SEO. But why would anyone want to use these links? The short answer is that they can be used in certain situations when spammy links are undesirable. For example, blogs may have code added by WordPress plugins or themes that automatically adds nofollow links to blog comments. It also protects sites from potentially harmful backlinks in case they are hacked and start linking out to dangerous sites on their own accord.
ALT tags are text descriptions of images that tell search engines what an image is about. They help improve your website’s SEO by helping search engines index your images and display them in image search results. When an ALT tag includes keywords, it will boost your page ranking on Google. Avoid stuffing your ALT tags with keywords, or you might get penalized. Always include a keyword if you can, but don’t try to stuff too many into one ALT tag, as this may also lead to a penalty. An audit SEO website should provide information on how to optimize your site using HTML and WordPress plugins.
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