So lets say you’re a Personal Trainer in Manchester and you want to rank for this search term. Google decides who ranks the highest in its search results based on a large number of factors and in part one of our series on How to Rank on Page 1 of Google we’ll look just one of these elements (dont worry, i’ll reveal them all over the coming weeks).

First off we need to optimise our own website / web pages. A standard web page is made up of 2 key areas. A Head Section and a Body Section. The Head section contains all the information required for the browser and search engines to interpret and display the web page properly both on your computer screen and in the search engine results.

In Part 1 of this series of articles we’ll look at the head section and specifically the Title Tag, The Description and The Keywords. (to view yours quickly, go to your website in a browser and right click the page and select view source)

You’ll see in the picture above are the three key components of the Head Section. There may well be much more in this section on your website but for this example thats all we need in there when we’re looking at SEO (search engine optimisation).

Title Tags – Now these are possibly one of the most important things as far as SEO is concerned but they are often under utilised. You’ll often see these replaced with Home Page or Company Name. Google often uses this tag as the title of your site in the search engine results. It also assumes that whatever you have in your title tags is a very good indication of what your site is all about so therefore what to rank you for. So you should put your main keyword/phrase in here. E.g. Personal Trainer Manchester (use a maximum of 70 characters in your title tags)

Description Tags – Well again Google uses this as its description of your site in its search engine results. It also assumes that this is also a good description of what your site is about. So it makes sense to write a small paragraph with your keywords within this body of text. Use a maximum of 155 characters in this area and write a proper sentence and dont stuff it with keywords. See the example in the picture above.

Keywords – Google NO LONGER USES THE KEYWORD ATTRIBUTE. Thats a fact, go and check it in Matt Cutts Blog. Matt is a head search engine expert at Google. However, maybe other search engines do? All i would say about this is stop stuffing it full of hundreds of keywords and just put 2 – 3 of your desired keywords in this section. Google doesnt use it today, but may well in the future.

Thats it for part one. Simply changing this section of your website / web pages will make a massive difference on how Google views your web presence. Do it now and reap the rewards.

If you need to hire an SEO Consultant, please visit CaspianSEO.co.uk

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