The titles of your website pages are incredibly important for SEO in defining your site and content therein. Titles are the first thing search engines pick up and are used to list and detail your website pages within search engine results.

Google search listing for Spider Online work – title is shown first

‘Our Work’ page on Spider Online website

Page titles should be as clear as possible and detail what each page contains. For example, your homepage should detail your company name and services/products as well as the typical homepage attribute ‘home’; just having ‘home’ as your title is incredibly vague and does nothing to differentiate you from competitors.

To maximise your website SEO it is also critical to ensure that all pages within your website have individual titles, this will improve indexing within search engines and help with visibility across a number of possible search terms.

2. Headings

Proper use of headers is important in defining distinct sections within your web pages. Headers are defined in decreasing levels of importance from

to

and are used to categorise and break up page content.

Our Work

Featured projects

FirstGroup

Reflexblue

Aberdeen University

Example of header usage

It is important not to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to style paragraph

tags as headers. Search engines pick up on content within header tags and use these for indexing. As such, you should try to make headings descriptive and succinct ensuring important keywords are contained within the headings.

3. Keywords

These are words related to your company, business and services / products offered. All major search engines still place an emphasis on the careful use of keywords. There are a number of key areas keywords should be applied:

 In ‘meta’ keyword tags – Example:

 Page titles – Example:

 Page headings – Example:

Our Work

 Body copy – Example:

Our Work consists of a mix of strategy, usable interface design and digital marketing. In this way we help brands build meaningful relationships with their audiences.

 Image alt tags – Example:

It is important to ensure your keywords are relevant to the page content and not over-loaded with irrelevant or misleading terms. Primary keywords should be used liberally throughout all content with secondary keywords used perhaps three or four times if possible.

4. Text Content

Going hand in hand with all of the above, it is essential that you provide high quality text content (either write yourself or hire a professional copywriter) for all website pages. The content should be relevant and current, sprinkled with your chosen keywords throughout.

Ensuring your content is up to date gives both visitors and search engines something new to look at when coming back to your website. Posting new articles, blog posts and general updates to static content will all help improve SEO ranking.

‘New’ content on the Spider Online website

In addition to the above, you should ensure your content is completely unique. Duplicating content throughout your website or copying from another site won’t do you any favours and could in fact harm your SEO ranking.

5. Links

Link building is still an incredibly significant aspect of SEO and the number of backlinks (incoming links) to your site can help define your websites importance within search engine listings. Google particularly likes backlinks and uses the number of backlinks on a site as part of its PageRank calculation.

News stories and links to Spider Online from ‘The Drum’ website.

It is not always easy to get your links onto other websites so it can take careful planning to implement this correctly. It is also necessary to ensure any inbound links are relevant i.e. the sites are related by industry or services offered and have something in common. Once you have a plan in place for backlinks, you should try and crosslink to as many pages on your website as possible.