Styling is really important when it comes to your appearance in the professional world. You wouldn’t apply for an important position in your most comfortable pair of jeans and a tee-shirt if you want the CEO of a company to notice you, right? Your website should receive the same kind of treatment, especially when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Basic SEO styling is important when you want to be noticed by search engines, particularly Google.
Here’s some great SEO Styling tips that you can use that will help you get noticed:
So Fresh and So Clean:
A professional appearance starts by keeping yourself clean and polished – and on your website, you want your Title Tags to be clean and streamlined. The Title Tags of your pages should tell a lot about your content, and contain an important keyword or two. Search engines use these as the link to your site in their databases, so make sure it’s eye-catching enough to click! Don’t overdo it though – just like you don’t want to be “that person” that wears too much cologne in the office, your Title Tag should be to-the-point and not too long. (55-60 characters are a good baseline.)
KISS (Keep It Short and Simple):
There’s a reason that items like the classic white button down, a tailored suit, wingtips, and the Little Black Dress never go out of style – they are classic. They say a lot without a lot of words. This should be the same for your site’s Meta Description. A Meta Description is VERY important in getting people to click-through to your site. These short simple paragraphs should give searchers a good idea about what’s on your page – treat writing these as advertising for your site! A good guideline is to keep the length between 150-160 characters. Stay away from using the same Meta Descriptions for every page – even if you have a great black suit, you don’t wear it every day, right?
Details, Details, Details:
A great outfit is all about the details – things like a great scarf, nice-looking shoes, nice jewelry and the cut of a suit. With websites, these details are your keywords. Those little details in specific places – your title tags, your meta descriptions, on your webpage, and even in your URL address can really add that OOMPH to your page rankings. Make sure your keywords are placed in your page well, where they make sense to your readers. A keyword density of no more than 5% on your page is ideal. You wouldn’t pile on a hat, scarf, earrings, necklace, fur stole, and choker, so don’t overload a page with keywords. It could actually hurt your ranking!
Organization is Important:
When you get dressed in the morning, you put on your outfit in a specific way. You need to put your Heading Tags in a specific order on your page, too! Heading Tags are used to establish the heading of a page from the rest of your content. The most important tag is the H1 tag and the least important is the H6 tags. A lot of people use them as styling elements for their site. They can be used this way, of course, but that’s not how search engines see them! Set differing levels of heading such as H1, H2, H3 – and make sure to keep that hierarchy! H1 is more important than H2, H2 is more important than H3, and so forth. Use your H1 tag for your absolute most important text, such as your page title. Use H2 for the next most popular heading, and structure your page from there. Try to use keywords in your heading content (as long as it makes sense to your readers)
These basic SEO Styling tips are the first steps to getting your site recognized by Google and other search engines. There are many other methods that our SEO team here at 5 Stones Media use to help you gain better visibility and web traffic. Let us help you increase your online presence! Contact us today to learn more about what 5 Stones Media SEO can do for your website.