SEO can be a hotly debated topic in the industry and standards can change and evolve from day to day. Web.com’s mission is to provide effective websites for our customers, so we employ best practices to ensure our customers have their best foot forward on the elements of SEO from the very first site build.
To ensure that an Advanced Custom Website is optimized from the day it launches, our copywriters and SEO experts collaborate on writing the page content to meet best practices.
What does that mean? After interviewing the customer about their business and services, our copy aims to include all of these key elements in a minimum of 400 words per page. Even if customers have an existing website and copy our SEO team will review and implement all of the key elements below.
Taking the customer’s words and converting it to optimized website copy is a huge value for our busy customers.
Keyword Research
Based on the initial interview with our customer, our SEO team will conduct Keyword Research for the new website based on the services or products provided and the geographic areas our customer services.
Keywords are unique to each content page from the home page to each individual service page.
For example: Customer is a collectables dealer in Jacksonville that specializes in baseball cards. His typical customers come from Jacksonville and Ponte Vedra.
Typical recommended keywords would include phrases like “vintage baseball cards jacksonville, fl, retro baseball cards ponte vedra, fl, rookie cards, jacksonville, fl”.
These keyword phrases are used in a variety of ways within the website and copy.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is a brief summary or overview of the webpage. It must be relevant to the page it is describing. Since Meta Descriptions may appear in search engine results, they should be compelling and entice browsers to visit the site.
We follow best practices when writing Meta Descriptions including a target of 150-160 characters since search engines only display the first 160 characters.
In addition we incorporate the keywords and service areas (geo-targets) in the Meta Description.
For example:
Customer is a collectables dealer in Jacksonville that specializes in baseball cards. His typical customers come from Jacksonville and Ponte Vedra.
Recommended Keywords”vintage baseball cards jacksonville, fl, retro baseball cards ponte vedra, fl, rookie cards, jacksonville, fl”.
Example Meta Description: “Experience North Florida’s largest selection of vintage baseball cards for sale. Visit Brandon’s Baseball cards in Jacksonville, FL.”
Page Titles
Title tags are a key “on page” SEO element. The title tag tells the website viewer and search engine what the page is about. Page titles appear in the website browser tab and in search engine results.
Page titles need to be short, informative, and front loaded with the relevant keywords. Typically a search engine like Google will only show the first 50-60 characters.
In our previous example, page titles for Brandon’s Baseball Shop” might look like this:
- Home: Vintage Baseball Cards | Jacksonville, FL – Brandon’s Baseball Cards or Vintage Baseball Cards | Jacksonville, FL
- Example (Products): Baseball Memorabilia | Jacksonville, FL
- Example (Contact): Baseball Cards | Contact – Jacksonville, FL
Headlines (H1 tags)
Headlines create structure on the page, draw the reader into the page, and tell the reader what that page is about. Because they may be the first piece of written content website visitor sees, they should be both compelling and relevant to the page’s title and reinforce that they are on the right page.
Our copy includes Keyword Relevant H1 headers on all pages.
Page Body Content
The most critical part of establishing a good base for search engines it to provide relevant, unique copy. It needs to keep the reader engaged, and give the business credibility with customers and search engines.
That means including keywords in the copy in a way that seems natural to human readers so that they are factored by search engines without stuffing them in.
Alt Tags – Image Tags
Alt tags are a brief description of an image primarily intended for the visually impaired and search engines. Proper descriptions including keywords add to the SEO value of the page overall.
Page Names
The page names themselves should be intuitive, clear and include keywords when possible.
The HTML page names are the actual URL for each page. They appear in the address bar of the browser.
Page URL’s should tie into the keywords being targeted on the rest of the site.
For example, our baseball could have a page about Vintage Baseball cards. Our recommended URL may be something like domain/Jacksonville-Vintage-Baseball-Cards/
Internal Links
The final element in good SEO copy is to include internal text links between pages on the customer’s website. For example “Learn more about our “vintage baseball card selection.” which would link from the Home Page to the domain/Jacksonville-Vintage-Baseball-Cards/ page mentioned above.