Search Engine Friendly is NOT Search Engine Optimized

When we are quoting development work for prospective clients we are often asked to develop a website that is search engine optimized. This usually brings me into a long-winded explanation on how developing a website to be search engine friendly is not the same thing as optimizing that website for search performance. Kind of like how building a car is not the same as making it ready to compete in the Indy 500. Those are two different tasks altogether.Let me explain.

The SEO provider or consultant should be involved in the website development process, though those two roles are completely different. The developer designs and creates the front and back end of the website. A good developer can do that job well, but mostly they do it to function for the user, not perform for the search engines. The SEO should be involved to ensure that what the developer produces is as search engine friendly as possible.

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What You Need to Know About Meta Description

Meta Description Tag

Although this tag does not weigh heavily in search engine ranking algorithms, it remains a powerful element of an effective SEO campaign. As the title tag, Meta description tag will always appear in search results. In general what you see in the search engine ranking pages are the Title tags then the description tag followed by its specified link page. It becomes a very important element to help attract visitors to click the link on your site.

Those who take the time to look through search results, read the titles and descriptions to find sites that are most likely to give them the information they seek are more likely that to be a targeted visitors.

The general rule is that you want every description of your tags to be unique. The description must be maximum 150 characters summary of what visitors can expect to find on this page and this page only. Descriptions for each page must be unique from each other. Be sure to summarize the page in a unique way.

But is not always advisable to put description tag on every page. There are some cases where it would be a better not put description tag. If you are targeting long tail keywords, then do not put meta tags. Description tags would be best use when targeting broader keywords.

An explanation to this is that if you go after long tail phrases in your article or blog post, there is a lot of variations that can come up in a description of 150 characters. If there are no description tags created, search engines will imports from the page snippets based on search made if those long-tail words are on the content.

Reason Why You Need SEO?

As a SEO specialist, Dubai-based, I’ve seen the numbers of  companies offering SEO services growing rapidly. But does website and company owners know about this kind of service? If yes, how many are they? I’m sure only few are aware what SEO can give your business and I hope this simple illustration will give better understanding why search engine optimization can help.

Let’s say Dubaian is planning to put up a restaurant business and he wants it to be located inside a mall.

Then for him to get more people to eat at his restaurant, he needs to find out the top 10 most visited malls.

The simple reason why Dubaian needs to built his restaurant in the top 10 visited malls is simply because the more people going to that mall, the more chances many will try and eat at his restaurant. We all know that the above Dubai shopping malls like  Dubai Mall, Mall of the Emirates, Deira City Centre, Dubai Festival Centre are the busiest malls specially on weekends so these are a good location for Dubaian.

The same thing goes when you have a website. For you to be able to get more traffic, more leads and more sales, your website must appear on the 1st page or top 10 results of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. A website really needs to be on the first page of results to get any real chance of being seen for a variety of terms and one way of achieving that is by doing SEO.

Hope this example helps you understand why you need search engine optimization or SEO.