How Website Structure and Meta Tags Impact Search Engines
In order for Google and other search engines to better understand the essence of a website, it is important to carefully complete Meta Tags and have a good website structure. To give us recommendations on what to focus on, I turned to Nicky Krastev. He is the owner of NT Websites and a specialist with over 10 years of experience in SEO and Digital Marketing.
Meta Tags and why they are important?
Meta Tags are an essential part of the on-page optimization of our website. Filling the meta titles and meta descriptions on each page of the website is of great importance for our SEO. This way, we help search engines understanding the essence of the page and index it accordingly for certain keywords. It is also a good practice to fill in the Open Graph protocol data used by social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.).
On-page optimization is a process that includes a lot of subtasks, one of which is filling the meta tags, therefore it is important to take it seriously.
Nicky Krastev, Digital Marketing Specialist and Owner of NT Websites
Also, an important task is to complete the structural data of the website. With the Google Structured Data Testing Tool, we could check how our structural data looks like. Another element we should pay attention to is the images we upload on the website. It is strongly recommended to fill alt tags, titles, and descriptions. In addition, it is good to name the image file with a keyword phrase, for example, not img32423.jpg, but your-keyword.jpg.
What to keep in mind when choosing keywords?
For a start, a keyword analysis should be made. This way we could find out which keywords are searched more by users and at the same time relevant to our website. One of the more popular free keyword analysis tools is Google’s Keyword Planner. In addition, other popular paid tools are Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush. After analyzing and selecting the keywords that we want to optimize our website for, we need to insert them into the content. It could be in the text, titles, alt tags of images, meta title, meta description, etc.
What should we look out for to avoid penalties?
We should be mindful not to overfill our content with focus keywords. To clarify, the key is to always keep a balance in the use of keywords. The basic rule is to write the content so it is interesting and visitors read more of it. As a result, Google also assumes that it is useful, and would rank the website higher.
We also have to pay a lot of attention to the links we put on our website. There could be a negative effect on our website if we place links from a penalized website. Another advice is to put internal links between individual pages and publications on our website. Moreover, of significant importance is to avoid having duplicate content on our website. A tool we can use to easily check for duplicate content is Siteliner.
Bonus Tip!
For any website that uses WordPress, I recommend the Yoast SEO plugin:
I use Yoast for the pages on my website and every new post I write. The plugin helps a lot with the content of the website, meta titles and descriptions, proper link placement, alt tags, the proportion of keywords, and a lot more. In addition here you can find discount packages! 😉