The ABCs of Title Tags and Keywords

When you’re new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), trying to navigate through unfamiliar terms like title tags and keywords can feel a little like getting lost in a giant maze. How can you make sense of it all? Where to start?

To help answer those questions, this article provides the essential information you need for optimizing your website, written in easy-to-understand, simple language! If you’re looking for some place to start, start here!

1. Keywords

You know how when you go on vacation to Palm Springs and want to find an Indian restaurant, you go to Google and type ‘Palm Springs Indian food’ and certain places come up? The words you typed into the search engine are keywords, and the resulting links are websites that relate to them.

SEO, essentially, is the process of finding ways to make your company come up in search results for those keywords that relate to what you do—so when prospects are looking for your services, it’s easy for them to find you. Using a variety of strategies and tactics shown to promote your online rankings, SEO can help you appear higher in search results and thus help you achieve greater traffic numbers.

2. Title Tag

When Google and other search engines decide how to rank websites in search results, they use complicated algorithms that involve various factors—two of the most important factors being the URL and the title tag. Keywords incorporated into these places will be given more weight than anywhere else.

What this means for you and your website is that you can improve search rankings by adding keywords into the section of HTML where you see <title>”Title of Your Page”</title>.

3. Meta Tag

Similar to the title tag, the meta tag informs search engines what a webpage is about. The meta tag, however, is more of a description and so can be longer than a title. Both the title tag and the meta tag are found in the “head” section of the source code.

4. Heading Tags

Heading tags like h1, h2, h3 and so on have two primary benefits: site styling and prioritization to search engines. H1 is usually the biggest and boldest text, working down through h6, designed to highlight main points to readers. But even more importantly, heading tags signal to search engines how information should be prioritized (making heading tags another good place for keyword placement). That way, when Google or Bing scans a webpage, they can determine what information is most important.

5. Backlinks

Essentially, backlinks are links from other websites or web pages to your site. The number of backlinks you have helps indicate to search engines how popular and important your site is. Likewise, links from powerful websites with high online authority will count more towards your popularity rankings than links from small ones. That’s why part of search engine optimization plans may include finding ways to get linked to from authoritative sites.

6. On-Page SEO vs. Off-Site SEO

When people refer to on-page SEO, they’re talking about using the content on your website to boost search engine rankings (using keywords, for example); off-site SEO, on the other hand, means finding ways to influence content outside your website (backlinking, for example) to improve search engine placement.

7. Black Hat vs. White Hat

Black-hat search optimization techniques are the kind where website owners try to ‘trick’ search engines into thinking their sites are more authoritative than they are (stuffing keywords, paying other sites to link to them and more). Not only are these tactics considered unethical, but also, if discovered by search engines, they can get you removed from results completely.

White-hat search optimization, on the other hand, refers to doing things the ethical way, as recommended by search engines, to boost results. These tactics include strong internal linking (linking to other pages in your site throughout your site), logical URL structures and incorporating sitemaps.

Conclusion

With or without a basic understanding of SEO, your practice has a lot to benefit from it—seek the assistance of your medical website company to help. By enlisting the help of an experienced search specialist, you can boost your online visibility and bring more patients to your site!