Stay Competitive in Search Marketing
Every Internet content provider wants to appear on the first results page of every search engine and beat their competition. Fighting your way to the top is a complicated process, but one important weapon in your SEO arsenal is the way you tag your content. As part of our digital inbound marketing plans we use a competitive analysis, and we examine how well the competitive is using some important tags.
Three Important Meta Tags
There are three important tags you should learn: title tags, description tags, and “h” tags. This all has to do with HTML code, so if you are not proficient with HTML, grab your cheat sheet. It's easy to do and vastly important. Good HTML tags can raise your rank in search engines and help more people find you.
Suppose that a student is looking up a site about Charles Dickens. He types the 
author's name into his search engine, and one of the first entries he sees is:
Charles Dickens: His Life and Novels www.ilovecharlie/authors/dickens/index.html This is the perfect research site for term papers, with commentaries on Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield and other Dickens novels.
In order for this to appear in the search engine, the web-site developer typed in a code like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Charles Dickens: His Life and Novels</title>
<meta name=”Description” content =”This is the perfect research site for term papers, with commentary on Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield and other Dickens novels.”>
</head>
Title Tags
The title tag alerts the search engine that what follows should be the on the first line. It appears in the <head> portion of the HTML code. Look again at the title tag of the above example.
<title>Charles Dickens: His Life and Novels</title>
Notice that the most important keyword on the web page appears at the beginning. The author could have lost his place on the first page of the search results if he had titled his page, “The Life and Times of Charles Dickens” The title tag should be from 40 to 70 characters long, and should not contain "the" "a" "as" or "of" as they waste valuable characters.
Description Tag
The content that you would like to appear on the search engine pages should be put in your description tag. It also appears in the <head> portion of your html code and looks like this:
<meta name=”Description” content =”This is the perfect research site for term papers with commentary on Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield and other Dickens novels.”>
The description tag should have fewer than 150 characters, and contain as many keywords from the site as possible. Write this part in complete sentences, and keep in mind that this is a good place to put in a strong advertising statement. Here is your chance to catch the browser's eye, and get him to click on your link.
Header or <h> tags
Header or h tags have an two important functions. First, they organize your page by the inclusion of sub-heads. Second, they assign a value to the keywords that you are using as your subheads, h1 being the most important. You have several HTML headers from which to choose. The format will look like this:
<h1>Little Dorrit</h1>.
Header tags are NOT included in the <head> portion of your html code, but rather in the body of your content.
Digital Inbound Marketing Plans & Competitive Analyis
Three of the most important tags you can use are title tags, description tags and header or h tags. Using HTML tags properly will give your web pages a competitive advantage, both in appearance and in competitive SEO rankings. When creating our Digital Inbound Marketing Plans we use the competitive analysis to ionform and help provide guidelines for content and proper tagging for our clients.
Contact us about how a competitve analysis can help youir marketing plan.
