This is the second post in a series about what SEO really is. Read the first post here. The purpose… to arm small business owners with an understanding of SEO, AND.. ask the right questions when looking to hire a developer or designer to build your website. In the last post, we covered what SEO is at the most basic level,… Keyword Research.
EVERYTHING you do on the web with regard to your business should be focused around keyword research on your industry and target market. If the developer or designer you’re looking to hire doesn’t start your build with extensive keyword research.. walk away FAST!
Right… Now that the need for keyword research has been made redundantly clear, let’s look at where the keywords go. They have to go somewhere. That’s the topic of this post.
1. On-page keyword placement meaning, the keywords you use on your visible pages and blog posts. What your visitors see and read.
2. Meta data, which are keywords placed in the backend or code of your site. These keywords can’t be seen by anyone visiting your website. They are in places called, meta description, and meta title. These are also called meta tags in genreal by industry peeps.
Two places: On-page where your visitors can see them, and in the meta data where Google sees them. You can’t do one with out the other. Google cross checks the meta data with the content on-page. If they match or are close, Google will index your site and each individual page based on the keywords you’ve used. Let’s look at the first blog post in this series and see what we find for keywords.
Everything in green is a keyword or related term
Everything in green is a keyword or related term. They’re all over the place! Now… let’s look at the code behind the scenes and see what’s there.
The highlighted lines are meta tags
Notice the same words in green here? That’s the meta data. The two most important “meta tags” are the Title Meta and the Description Meta. I’ve also used the Keyword Meta Tag in this post but Google announced in 2008 that they stopped looking at the Keyword Meta Tag back in 2006. Google does this all the time. Change the rules and tell you about it months or years later. Some SEO experts think Keyword Meta Tags still add value so it’s OK to have them in there.
Anyway… the point here is, the developer you’re looking to hire should understand the difference between on-page and meta SEO. If they do, you’ll need to ask them a few questions. Here they are.
- Who’s writing the on-page text?
- Do you add meta tags?
The first question is a big one. Most designers and developers will not craft your on-page copy for you. Your are expected to write it all. If the developer says they’ll write it, the cost of development will be much higher. Professional writers are not cheap because quality writing is an art. It’s not easy and takes time. Bad writing or crappy site content will hurt your web ranking and your business. If you’re not a writer, consider hiring a 3rd or 4th year college student or free lance writer.
Most developers could care less what you put on your site. It’s your problem. At Portland Internet Design, we work with you to craft the content. We give you the SEO page names for your site and a list of the keywords you should use for each page. Once you’ve drafted the page copy, we act as a publishing editor, making sure it’s 100% SEO, with proper sentence structure and grammar. We help you create professional site copy. (shameless plug) If your potential developer does not offer to help you with this, find someone who will or hire a free lance SEO web content writer.
Now for the meta tags… If the developer or designer you’re looking at says they, “do SEO” they had better take care of the meta tags. Ask them straight out which tags they add and how they craft the meta content. If they don’t have a keyword plan for your pages, the SEO will probably be very disorganized. This is typical, lazy SEO. Many times, the developer will just grab the first 5-10 keywords they can find and drop them on all of your pages. They’ll even use the same meta description for every page. This is BAD and LAZY SEO. It is also looked upon quite poorly by almighty Google. Meta tags should be unique for each page and post on your website.
The next post will summarize what we’ve learned so far and cover the technical aspects of SEO Web Development. Content is king, but there’s some techie stuff that needs to be done as well. We’ll cover actual keyword research down the road. I wanted to explain SEO basics first…
John
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