With all of the misleading or conflicting information out there about SEO, how can you actually tell what’s real?
The truth is, the best SEO information is the content that you can implement, test, and drive results from. Marketers should have a clear understanding of these SEO basics.
That is what I do with my clients and what I’m hoping to help you do in this article. Marketers, brace yourselves, let’s dive in to some SEO basics for the website header.
Title Tags
A lot of information will tell that title tags aren’t important. Others will say they are a ranking factor and you need to have your keywords in them. My personal opinion is that they are a ranking factor, but not for the reasons you think. Title tags are vital for driving higher click through rates (CTRs) as well as developing topical relevance.
They are what shown in search results, bookmarked pages, back and forth browser windows, open graphs on social media sites (if you have them set to share), and more.
Having the main keyword phrase in your title is important, but having a descriptive and enticing title tag that is relevant to the content on the page is more important. That is what will ultimately make someone want to click through to your page and also help them remember what that page is about when they bookmark it or are trying to find it again in their browsing history.
Meta Descriptions
Search engines may use a meta description underneath your title tag when they have a relevant query for it. They don’t always show it and at this point, it probably isn’t a ranking factor or something that will dramatically impact your positions…with one exception, UX.
Meta descriptions are a way for you to sell what the person will find if they click through to your site. It could be a great deal on a page, step by step instructions on solving a problem or an easier way to accomplish something like baking a pie. There are a lot of case studies showing up where an increased CTR has lead to an increase in positions (not second page to first, but 4th to 5th or 3rd to second). They also have another impact.
A meta description and title tag combination that drives more traffic gives you more opportunities to make money. It could be impressions for ads, product sales or client leads. This is why meta descriptions are still important for SEO. They can have a direct impact on revenue, even if they do not impact your ability to rank.
Canonical Links
These are in fact an important ranking factor. Canonical links tell search engines where your real copy lies and which pages to ignore because they have duplicate versions. They are used in multiple ways.
If you have indexable search queries and the pages pull in your main content, the canonical link can say, although we have the same copy here, index this page instead. If you have a paginated recipes, products, or content, you can use the canonical link to say where the main version of the page is or the rel prev and rel next attributes to help search engines crawl and index the series properly.
Canonical links will also help search engines find the original content source on mobile or desktop versions of your site (which could change with the mobile index). They help your website rank, but it’s more of tech SEO item to check than a ranking signal or factor.
Xrobots
Xrobots are not your Robots.txt. Instead they are more granular versions that guide search engines on how to interact and engage when indexing specific pages. For example, you can tell Google to crawl and index a page but tell Yahoo no.
Another option could be that the page and content is available until a certain date. You can also use xrobots to follow the links on the page, but not to index them. You would do this when you have pages that have duplicate content (i.e. not the content you want to have rank) but also have links that point to places on your site that you want search engines to find and index. Or, if you have thin content and don’t want it indexed, but also have good navigation and want search engines to use it to discover more of your site.
If your IT team is saying they fixed the Robots.txt and never mention xrobots, then it’s time you investigate, as there is more to the tech side of your robots tags than they looked at.
Understand the why
There is a lot more that goes into the header from an SEO perspective. It could be excess code, meta keywords, open graphs, twitter cards, and even the naming of the images like your favicon. The goal of this post is to get you to understand what each is so that you can recognize it and understand why it is currently a ranking factor or was a factor in the past.
Once you know why something exists or how it is used, then you can begin testing on your own. Testing is how you can separate fact from fiction in SEO and also discover which resources are real, opinions, or fake.