Author: Nancy McCord

Where and what are the most important parts or elements of your website for top search engine optimization impact? What things can give you the most bang for your buck?

1. The most important element is your title tag. This is found in your source code between title and /title. What you put here appears on your browser screen at the very top just to the right of the IE icon near the edge of your monitor. It should be keyword dense, on topic to your website and NOT contain your business name.

2. The second most important element is your navigation. If you are using JavaScripted drop down menus, you must supply text based navigation for search engines to follow or they will not move to the inside of your website to spider pages. Typically we will supply text links in alphabetic order in the footer of a page for a site like this. Better yet would be to build a site with navigation using CSS or text and not have to add footer links. But it is better to remediate than to not have your site be search engine friendly.

3. The third most important is the meta description. This is found only in your page’s source code. One of the biggest errors we see is the use of the same meta description and title tag site wide. Each of these elements should be unique for each page. Google did not for a period of time use the description that you created for you meta description tag, but is doing so now if you have header code to tell Google not to use what you have supplied to DMOZ.

4. Everyone asks about the meta keyword tags, but Google and we place no value on them right now. Should you still include them. Yes I guess you could, but I would not waste huge time on them, but I did feel the need to mention them but this field is not important.

If you have another element you think is important, just click comments and leave me one to share what you think is important.