The browser uses the title to give the browser’s window (tab) a descriptive name. There are no hard and fast rules regarding the length of the title. However, the recommended length of the title is somewhere up to 65 to 70 characters, including spaces.

The description property is used by search engines to correctly classify the page and display it for the right search queries. However, the description is only a suggestion, so it does not necessarily have to be displayed by the search engine. The search engine sometimes displays a different section of the page.

The suggested length of meta description is somewhere between 150 to 160 characters including spaces. You can even use fewer characters and it works great if your descriptions looks appealing and read better but don’t try to create lengthy descriptions that doesn’t make much sense or description with more than 160 characters.

The meta tag describes what the name indicates: it specifies the name of the author of the page written and (or) published.

The appropriate character encoding should be set on every website. If this is not done, it can happen that e.g. for german “Umlaute” (“ä”, “ü”, “ö”) and special characters are not displayed correctly.

A canonical URL marks a URL for search engines that this is the master copy. Tagging such URLs is cruicial for SEO if there is a website with duplicate content. If a search engine detects such pages, they will be penalized by Google Search and other search engines for bad rankings.

Pages will detected as duplicate content when parts of the content appears on several, at least one additional page. Duplicate content results when content is copied 1:1 from other websites (or pages on the same web). Even on pages where a product is offered in two colors (online shops for example), the URL is slightly different, but the page’s content is almost the same. Therefore, it is important to use the canonical tag correctly to inform search engines that a page is not duplicate content.

The robots meta tags can be used to instruct the web crawlers of the search engines which links and thus pages of yours may be indexed, i.e. included in the search results. You can also determine whether the current page should appear in the search results or be excluded.

Search engines differentiate here basically between two characteristics:

Imagine being in the search engine’s shoes. Are you comfortable sending users to your website? If the answer is a clear yes, then that’s where a lot of the more technical work and more traditional SEO may come into play. But, if the answer is a tentative no then that’s probably a sign that you need to add more value for users before you start thinking about technical stuff.

Providing users with substantive, useful and unique content is what compels them to stay on your pages, building familiarity and trust. What constitutes high quality will depend on the nature of the content and varies based on the type of content and industry.

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines break down the characteristics of high quality content by type:

Suppose you’ve planned your website should earn money for a living. For professional use, it is necessary to pay particular attention to these standards as Google’s algorithms may give more weight to authoritativeness, expertise, and trustworthiness signals.

Content is the cornerstone of your SEO efforts and not a place to skimp. Creating and investing in a clear content strategy is critical to your as with nearly all other factors, SEO success depends on content quality.

Researching keywords, the search terms your target audience uses, is the most important SEO factor for content quality after quality. Research on keywords will support you in developing content that gives the right answers for what people are searching for.

To understand better what type of pages a search engine returns for the result pages on the various keywords, it helps to clarify how search engines typically classify keywords and which type of pages will be eligible to rank for those terms.

Consider classifying keywords by their intent:

Cross-reference your potential keywords with what currently ranks in the search results to see the types of results Google chooses to display for each query. Google may assign a different intent to the keyword than you expect; for example, typing "sandwich" generates mostly local results. Using the keyword "Jekyll", the generated results reflect the software that name but a lot of matches in literature and film. This changes if you modify the search expression to "howto Jekyll". Those results are quite navigational and focus on pages that explain the usage of the software named Jekyll.

Search engine providers spend a lot of time and money on developing intelligent algorithms to analyze the users intentions based on the keywords given by a query. Cross-checking is important because users usually give up to three keywords for a search that matches hundreds of thousands of pages on the Internet.

Keyword research can provide:

When you evaluate which keywords are viable, use them to optimize your pages by including them in your content, headings, and titles. This strategic placement of valuable keywords will help to prioritize search engines for your articles over your competitors' content.

Visitors, and search engines, prefer timely and up-to-date information. You can still make smaller updates to your content pages by simply updating the publishing date or continuously churning out new, smaller posts and pages to boost the freshness of your site.

Google has also long applied a factor called Query Deserved Freshness (QDF) for content ranking to certain queries. Suppose a search query suddenly becomes popular, for example, hurricane, when there is an active hurricane. In that case, if Google will apply the factor QDF to those searches, the results will change to reflect news and information about the topic. You can harness a freshness boost to increase the visibility of your pages on the SERPs by creating content relating to popular trends.

You may be able to harness a freshness boost to increase your visibility on the results page by creating content relating to popular trends, upcoming events or holidays and breaking news.

A tremendous added value is given in explicitly answering your readers' questions on your pages. With your reader’s potential question in mind, you’re creating content that meets your audience’s needs. Search engines may render your content in knowledge panels or other rich text results on the SERPs generated if you answer potential questions.

As a role of thumb, half of all searches at a search engine end without a click on any other content than the result page. The enhanced content of the search engine result pages can satisfy users by answering questions on the results page!

It is highly recommended whenever you write an article or post related to a specific question, you should try to make the answer accessible to the reader by, e.g., adding an H2 within the content. Accessibility is important, but it really counts to ensure the reader sticks around.

Your content’s complexity level should be deep enough to thoroughly answer the user’s question. The tricky part is figuring out how specific your content should be.

If you want to provide more value than your competitors, you can still throw more words at it to achieve an arbitrary word count. Some queries, such as "what is the fastest land mammal" has a relatively straightforward answer, whereas other questions, like "why is the cheetah the fastest" may warrant a more in-depth explanation.

Research of keywords may help to decide what topics should be focused on and need a higher level of complexity. By analyzing the results of the keyword research, you’ll find some answers on your audience’s preferences and your competitor’s offerings to decide better how deep to dive for specific content pages.

All the heavy work to learn how to manage a full chain for content optimizations is behind you; congratulations on what you achieved! The process of content optimization requires experience. You can learn what counts and what tools can be used in a day. But in the end, experience is important for successful optimization work: for the content and SEO tactics.

Content optimization (and SEO) is quite complex and hard to do. Therefore it is important to break down the full chain into smaller steps to make the optimization work more manageable. Remember all the single steps starting with the improvement of the content, research on keywords, and giving answers down to scaling the complexity of your web pages.

You reached the last chapter of this tutorial, and you’re done sofar. You learned in some hours what counts and what tools can be used. But in the end, experience is important for successful optimization work; in general for the content and SEO as well.

The only (and the best) advice I can give is to set up your own website and optimize your site for SEO. You’ll see with the result pages of the search engines if your SEO was successful.

Keep in mind that optimizing a website is a long run. It will take a while as your improvements will result in a better ranking. And this is as well an important thing to know!

As already mentioned: give SEO a try, set up your web, and start the work to become more and more experienced as an successful SEO specialist.

Find here an overview on all chapters this tutorial:

Reading this chapter is not essential for working on the project first time. Additional links will be helpful to learn more. The references point to important sources of manufacturer documentation. Here you can find out all the possibilities what the products can offer. Experiences from others are extremely important when dealing with software and more complex projects. Links to other sites may answer common questions from the experience of professionals. Here you can think far outside the box of a project currently worked on.

HTML and semantic tagging
Spam policies for Google web search
Detecting spam
Ranking results
How Google is testing searches