4) The Fundamentals of SEO

Metadata and what you include in that data is vital to getting your page to the top of Google results, most metadata isn’t visible to the general public but you the owner of your website can see it and most of the data is customisable but only in moderation because you want the website to be successful which means you need to use some known ways of crawling your site, firstly let’s think about the first thing a potential customer will see in the search results, the result cards you see when looking through a Google search all have a title and a small description below it this is called the meta description.

The first thing to do is to make sure that your homepage title is very clear and simple but as for the text beneath the title, keywords in the description don’t necessarily count for much when ranking your website, the title however does matter. To find out what your homepage title is you’ll need to go to your homepage and inspect element and find your page title by searching <title> to find out what the current page title is.

There is a hierarchy to how you should lay your H1, H2 and H3 etc, they are numbered which means you should start with H1, the H1 tag is applied to the title / first heading of your page or blog and tells google to crawl this first, it’ll put the most important information first, h1 will appear in google searches usually in the blue hyperlink. The H2 tag is used in main subheadings, these have to be placed beneath an H1 heading, H2 headings are used to break up content, the H2 tag does have some SEO value and is very useful for long-tail keywords, something that is important to add is that you can use more than 1 H2 tag on one page.

H3 tags are commonly used to break up content even further and to make other content stand out even more, these are commonly subheadings used within text and just like H2 you can use more than one, this has little SEO value but is still worth using.

Keywords should be used throughout your page longtail keywords, a longtail keyword is a variation of your main keyword. So imagine my keyword was Shepards Pie. A longtail keyword would be cooking a lasagna, all these are different. They are longer versions of my main keyword. We call these longtail keywords and the related phrases. So for example, if I want to rank for Shepards Pie I might want to use the phrase mash or gravy. Now all of these show Google that I’m an expert in my field because when I talk about Shepards Pie, I’m talking about everything that goes into the design, that’s why it’s important to include keywords, synonyms, longtail keywords, and related phrases all throughout your content because it helps Google to understand the context of that copy.

There is a general rule of thumb when it comes to SEO, longer content performs better than shorter content. Not in all instances but it’s something good to work towards. Naturally, when you write longer content, you’re going to include more instances of your keyword, more synonyms, more longtail keywords, more related phrases, and top phrases and topics. What you’re doing is you’re showing Google that you’re more of an expert because that’s what it looks for when it tries to figure out if you’re an expert in that area, but that does depend on the use case, If it’s a regular service page or product page, you’re looking at around 300 words at least that you’ll want to include on that page. Blog Posts work better with longer content and will perform better. Aim for at least 500 words per blog post that you’re doing, adding more depth because you’re just showing Google you’re an expert in that area.