E-Builders, Inc. » Site Builder Tips

MetaTags Optimization

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:42:08 +0000

You still hear about meta tags, although their importance has decreased in recent years. What are they, should you bother with them, and if so, how do you create them?

Metatag Author Tutorial

Metatags are special tags added to the top of a web page (in the “head” section) in order to describe overall information about the page. There are many of them, with many different purposes — some describe how the page should be cached, when it expires, what language the page is in, who the author is, etc.

When discussing search engine optimization, the two meta tags that are usually spoken of are the “keywords” metatag, and the “description” metatag.

These tags were once important, as they were used by formerly popular search engines to determine the proper keywords for the page, and the description to display.

Today, they don’t matter much — search engines are more sophisticated, determining keywords from the page itself — on good days, with well written and structured pages. Descriptions are formed on the fly by taking the words around the keyword match, or other words that look relevant to the search engine.

In fact, some suggest that the thing most leading search engines are likely to do with the keywords metatag is to determine what keywords the author may have over-optimized the page for, in order to “penalize” the page in the results.

So should you bother messing with them?

I do.

Search engines change their ways all the time. Popular search engines can be replaced by newer and better ones. Since the keyword and description metatags have historically been part of the page, and people still use them, we might see them again become a factor (probably a small factor) in search results.

Additionally, some of the older, smaller engines still send the occasional dribble of traffic — if one of them is willing to use your description, then so much the better.

It only takes a minute of your time to add them, so why not?

Meta tags optimization

My process for authoring content pages goes something like this:

Decide on my topic.
Pick the keywords that I want to target relative to my topic.
Write my content, bearing those keywords in mind.

Use the keywords in structural elements of the page.
Use the keywords in the body of the content.

Write a description for the page and put it in the description metatag.
Add my keywords to the keywords metatag.

Double check that the keywords you are entering are actually in the body of the content, to avoid possible penalties.
Never use a word more than three times.

Just how you do those last two steps will depend on how you’re authoring your content.

If you are using a weblog or other content management system (CMS), there is probably a place for you to enter your meta tag information when writing your page (this may be built-in, or a “plug-in” that handles this).

If you are using a web authoring program that has a “wysiwyg” view, there is probably a page property dialog that will allow you to enter the information.

If you’re writing HTML, then you write them like this:

Note that the keywords are separated by a comma and a space, and both tags go between the and tags.

Site Wide Meta Tags

Some software allows you to enter tags to be used across the entire site. If your CMS or weblog software includes this feature, should you use it?

Probably not.

Remember that search engines don’t find web sites — they find web pages.

Focus your optimization efforts on specific pages of your site, and you will be better rewarded down the road.

The author of this article, Chuck Lawson , is the owner of Insanely Great Sites.

Insanely Great Sites helps small business website owners learn the simple steps they can take to turn average-performing web sites in to profit-generating prospect & customer magnets.

You can find the latest revision of this article, plus articles on a number of related topics at Insanely Great Sites

Used with permission.

Spam, Your E-mail Address & Your Web Site

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:25:08 +0000

Address harvesting robots trawl the ‘net relentlessly, looking for anything that resembles an e-mail address. When they find an address, it is added to spam mailing lists and sold to all of those people who like to send you e-mail about your mortgage and your sex life.

But you still need to have a way to have visitors to your site contact you.

Want to know how to have your cake and eat it too? Click here to find out!

Listing your site on Open Directory (DMOZ)

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:22:41 +0000

“The Open Directory Project (aka “DMOZ”Â) represents an excellent free alternative to paying for a Yahoo listing. An “open source”Â community-edited service, Open Directory has grown larger than Yahoo’s aging offering. Since many “portal sites”Â and “start pages”Â include the Open Directory listings as their own Yahoo-like service, a good listing on the Open Directory can often directly send more qualified traffic than an equivalent listing on Yahoo’s directory.”

Click here to learn how to add your site to Open Directory

Traffic and the Average Website

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:15:06 +0000

“How can we categorize traffic for the average website? ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s pretty simple, actually Ã¢â‚¬â€œ the average website doesnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t get any traffic to speak of…”

It’s depressing, but it’s true — click here to learn about the kind of traffic most web sites get.

Measuring Your Web Site Traffic

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:12:06 +0000

Do you know who’s visiting your site, where they come from, and how long they stay? If not, then you are designing and tweaking your site in the dark.

“Regardless of the statistics package you use, whether itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s provided by your web host or one you download and run on your own computer, itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s vitally important that you learn how to read your site statistics, and do it regularly. Otherwise, you have no tools to gauge how well your site is performing, and how well you are promoting your site Ã¢â‚¬â€œ whether links from other sites are actually sending you traffic, whether search engines are finding your most important pages, etc.”

Click Here to Learn How to Measure your traffic

More on Business Weblogs

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 04:53:15 +0000

I’ve mentioned before the idea of using web log (“blog”) technology to keep your web site fresh and up-to-date, and to add a more personal experience for the users. The kind folks over at Blogroots have made a couple of chapters of their new book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs available to read free online (here).

Of particular interest is Chapter 8, “Using Blogs in Business”. In addition to to using a weblog to enhance your online site, the authors also discuss a lot of ideas on how blogs can be used as knowledge bases, team coordination points and project management tools. Very nice.

More On Writing for the Web

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 04:49:09 +0000

In Microcontent & Macrocontent, Diana Lott gives some useful, practical advice on how to structure both headlines and body copy to strike a balance between what will get the attention of a site visitor, and what will get attention in a search engine, and why

Coming from a very different place, one of my favorite sources, A List Apart, this week offers 10 Tips On Writing the Living Web. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of the, “10 Tips” is a lot more about attitude and motivation. If you write any noticeable amount of content online, you should spend a few moments giving this list some serious thought.

Life in the Slow Lane

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 04:33:33 +0000

Like most web developers, I do most of my work on what would have been an obscene amount of bandwidth back in the bad-old-days.

A recent connectivity failure, however, made me re-learn some old lessons and home truths that many of us have forgotten, and that are costing us money every single day. After 18 months of nearly trouble-free service, my cable modem died late last week. Naturally, that meant several days before a technician would arrive to repair it. In the meantime, I dug a conventional modem out of my old travel kit, and got to re-learn the joys of dialup.

Back in the mid 90’s, I paid a lot of attention to things like graphic size and page load speed. I never really forgot that, but after spending a lot of time away from dialup, I got lazy, and my pages bloated up. Apparently, so did everyone else’s.

For most sites, a quick check of your logs will reveal that the majority of your visitors come from AOL, MSN, and Earthlink. The majority of these people are using dial-up modems, and many of them are lucky to get a connection of 26,400 kbps or faster on their 56K modems.

In that environment, a reasonably fast page loads in 30 – 45 seconds. Several major technology corporations had pages that took over five minutes to load however. At that kind of snail’s pace, most visitors are going to go to the page they absolutely have to go to, and any other marketing message is going to be lost. I can’t imagine what would have inticed me to visit one extra page on those sites in order to be sold something new.

The lesson, first and foremost, is to CHECK YOUR IMAGES. Make them as small and tightly compressed as possible while still being visually correct.

Second, BE SURE YOU USE HEIGHT AND WIDTH TAGS on ALL images. If images in tables have height and width tags, then at least the table can load and people can look at your text while the images are coming. Which brings us to…

Third, LOOK AT YOUR TEXT MESSAGE. Assuming you have size tags on your images, even on a fast page many visitors are going to have 30 – 45 seconds to look at the text on a page before the images finish loading. Your marketing message should be spelled out clearly and enticingly in the text, and be able to stand on its own and keep the visitor interested before the graphics arrive. If it doesn’t, they may well hit the back button before your page ever finishes loading.

Of course, we all know these things, but it’s easy to forget, or to decide we’ll come back to the page to deal with that “someday”.

Every so often, however, it’s a Good Thing to go spend a little quality time seeing what your sites look like to the average AOL or MSN dialup user. If you don’t keep your site effective for these users, you are automatically ruling out the majority of users from seeing your message, and leaving money laying on the table.

How Vistors Rate Your Site

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 04:31:22 +0000

Another item on the credibility front — this article goes over the basics of visitor preference and what visitors really look at.

Their conclusions? That most visitors immediately judge the site on it’s design — professionality and applicability to purpose — and trust a site that “looks good” more than a site that doesn’t.

Once that test is passed, however, visitors then rate a site on its contents and how well it meets their needs.

The upshot is that having both a good design and solid in-depth content are key. If yoru design turns them off, they won’t be staying to view your content, but if they can’t find what they need, they’ll be gone anyway.

How Credible is Your Site?

Admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 04:28:55 +0000

Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab’s Web Credibility Research project has compiled a list of 10 Credibility Guidelines for web sites.

This list was compiled over a period of three years, and reflects interviews with over 4500 people.

While most of the guidelines are common sense (make sure your site is easy to use, accurate, and recently updated), some of the items may surprise you — or at least their order of importance may surpise you.

You can find the current list of guidelines here