Google uses hundreds of different signals and criteria to rank your website. There are many overlooked SEO considerations that people often miss when designing a website. Work with an SEO expert to develop a cohesive optimization strategy before you begin any work on your site.

Keyword research

Good keyword research is essential to the success of a successful of any website marketing campaign. A descriptive, yet keyword rich domain name is imperative to your success. Choose keywords for your content that are relevant to your business or industry. You want to have terms that have a good search volume but are not too initially competitive.

It takes time and effort to go after high competition phrases. A good strategy is to have more immediate, attainable keyword goals and get ranking for those first. Continue to revisit your targeted keywords as markets and search patterns fluctuate often.

Take the time to work with your SEO specialist to ensure a proper selection of terms to target. Your targeted keywords will need to be included in the page title, the meta description tag and in the heading elements and content of your site and will be the primary factor in determining your rankings in search engines.

An analysis needs to be performed of the competitiveness of your keywords against who is currently in the top ranked positions for those same terms in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This will provide an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your current and potential competitors which you may be able to exploit to your own success.

Meta Tags

Once you have developed a list of keywords to target, implement these in to your website HTML code. This is one of the most crucial areas of SEO that often get overlooked.

Page Title: (while technically not a meta tag) is the first thing that search engine bots look at when attempting to classify and index your site. It carries the most weight for SEO and must be relevant to the content of your page and site as well. A title tag should be no more than 165 characters, otherwise the extra text will be truncated and show as 3 dots (“…”).

Meta Description: This is the description that shows in the search results. Have a clearly worded tag line that states exactly who or what you are and what you are providing. The description must be less than 155 characters and should include your most important keywords that you are targeting.

Meta Keywords: While this tag is not considered crucial to SEO anymore, it is included for best practices. Do not use more than 8-10 keywords (300 characters) and make sure that the same words appear in the content of the page they are being used on.

Content

Google has always stated that content is paramount for rankings. The content of your site not only lets your viewers know what your site is about, but it is what the search engine bots use to classify your site. The newest algorithm update from Google means now more than ever, well written, original textual content is mandatory for all onsite and offsite web content. Failure to provide relevant content carries the risk of incurring ranking penalties from Google.