Place of design

Title tag

Example:

<TITLE CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page”>

This is the page title, must be readable English, and appears in the browser tool bar, and as the website title. On search engines, using the above example “Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page” is displayed as the “bit you click on” in some search engines. Goggle usually reads about 90 characters of this tag, so it is wise to set a character limit of 60, as the displayed part is often shorter. It is worth knowing that the search engines look at the content of this for relevancy (compared to the text on the page is on) and the content in terms of searching

In the example above the relevant keywords were: Beautiful Wedding Photography Richard King, Count = 5 across 1 page

It is completely OK to have different title tags on different pages – Example:

<TITLE CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page”>
<TITLE CONTENT =”Contact Richard King – Your local Nottingham wedding photographer”>
<TITLE CONTENT =”Stylish wedding picture galleries by bridal photographer Richard King”>

**Search engines will note the differences in the keywords used**
Relevant keywords  were: Beautiful Wedding Photography Richard King Contact local Nottingham bridal photographer Stylish picture galleries
Relevant keyword count: 13 across 3 pages

The phrase relevant keywords will come up a lot… basically, its really good news if those keywords are actually in the body text of the page, and between the <H>Heading</H> tags too

Description Tag

Example:

<META name description CONTENT =”I am a family wedding photographer based in Burton Joyce, on the Newark side of Nottingham. I provide reportage and traditional albums, available with black and white or colour images. Bridal portraiture is a speciality”>

Everything mentioned about the TITLE tag is relevant here, except the length should be more than 55 characters and less than 250 characters

Alt tags

Example:

<img src=”couplet’s” alt=”Newly wed bride and groom having confetti thrown all over them”>

These are the “alternative” tags offered by designers for browsers that do not display images. The text in these tags is read by search engines, and the actual words mused make a difference, and ought to reflect the content of the page. When you move your mouse over one of these tags, the text is often displayed, so it must be readable English length must be under 125 characters long

“longdesc” is a tag that ought to be used (instead of alt) if the length of descriptive text is over 125 characters (i.e. For long descriptive technical illustrations) the “longdesc” tag isn’t noticed by search engines

Keyword Tag

Example:

<META name keywords CONTENT =”photographer, wedding, Nottingham, picture, wedding photographer, etc…”>

Again – the keyword list is important, and it is also useful to include typo’s and miss-spellings (something I do naturally). It is quite a good idea to vary your keywords on all the different pages on the site. Again, the relevancy of the keywords chosen applies in the same way as in the title and description tags – The important keywords should be in the body text on the main page, and in the headlines too. It is quite acceptable to pop phrases in the keyword content too

The length of the content must be between 200 and 1055 characters

The best advice is go ask 10 people” what would you type into Goggle to find xxxxx” and use whatever they say as your keywords

Summary
Search engines read text, and without it you will not get a decent ranking, the text used in all the meta information, must reflect the text on the web page. Unfortunately photographers have sites with little text, and it will be noted that the websites that do well have lots of text on them

If you keep your META information within the limits allowed, search engines will love your site and give you a fighting chance of a ranking. If you add the META information in a logical and smart way, thinking about the content – this will improve the ranking further

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot
Search engines penalise:

• Posting your address on thier ADD URL web page to many times
• Lists of keywords in the text
• Blatant spamming of keywords (over use of 1 or 2 words)
• Hidden text (black or dark grey text on a black background for example)

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