Search Engine Essentials for Every Website

I hate to be redundant.  Seriously, I really despise repeating myself. (If you aren’t smiling right now you either have no sense of humor or you don’t know what redundant means)

All kidding aside, I plan to repeat a couple of things in this post.

First of all, I you haven’t done so already, you need to go and sign up for the free bonuses offered by StomperNet right away.  They are giving away tons of SEO tools right now for the price of shipping.  I have already talked about this awesome deal, but the offer ends today.  So if you are reading this after Monday the 15th, sorry you missed out.  Keep reading anyway for some more other freebies.  If not, open this link in a new window and do so before it’s too late!

By the way I just heard they have added even more than they were offering this weekend for the last day of this offer.

OK, now that that is out of the way, we can proceed.

SEO Metatag Information every Online business person needs to know

I spend a lot of time talking about social networks here, and I feel like using them the right way is important to your business, but I might have neglected to mention the importance of Search Engine Optimization.  So Listen up.

The first thing you need to know is what metatags are.  To put it simply, they are bits of information on every single WEBPAGE that search engines read and then learn about that website.  I stress webpage because you would be terrible wrong if you assumed you needed to put metatags on your homepage and you were all set to go.

You must put them on every single page on your site.

You can see the metatags for my home page in the image below.

Two very important things in metatags are the page description and the keywords.   The description should be a sentence or two which describes that respective page.  This is what your visitor will see at Google (or anywhere else) when they find you by searching in a search engine.

If you are designing your page in a typical web builder, you should have the option of putting these in as you are adding the pages.  You will have to see your particular builder for exactly how you add them, but please make sure you do.  You want to use relevant keywords for your niche and always, for Pete’s sake write for the visitors, not just the search engines.

Just a note on keywords.  Someone who has a page, say about goldfish, might want to add words like “pet fish” and “goldfish bowls” to the keywords.  You want to make certain if you are doing this that you actually talk about those things in the page itself.  If you supply keywords that you aren’t really using, the search engines will punish you like a school boy blowing spitballs at the teacher.

If you use wordpress, which I highly recommend for most cases, then you need to check out some of these plugins.

Two Great Wordpress SEO Plugins

All In One SEO – Your titles get rewritten to your actual post title. – Your categories, plus custom fields with the name ‘keywords’, get written as META keywords. – If you have an excerpt it gets written as your META description. If not, a custom field with the name ‘description’ is used.

wpSEO – this is the one I use, but I am considering moving to All In One SEO.  This one gives you lots of customization features and automatically creates metadata for every post.   The page is German as it was created by a German author, but hey, let’s be honest – it’s hard to beat German programming – oh wait that’s engineering.  Anyway, the download link is clear and you should use it.

Sure there are about a thousand others, but one of these two will get you going well.  As always, if you use a different plugin you would like to recommend I would love to hear about it.  Please let us know what you use.

If you find this helpful, you should subscribe so you can stay tuned.   I will be addressing other SEO techniques in future posts, as well as a wealth of other useful information for work from home entrepreneurs.

More on this topic

• Using Metatags to Drive Better Traffic
• Search Engine Optimization: Deeplinking
• Search Engine Optimization: Keyword Research
• Market Research and a Bit of Irony
• New Social Search Site Scour Says Search Socially

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