Meta Tags

Summary

Your Web pages have HTML tags that tell the browser how to display the page. Many of these tags control things like color, size and emphasis of text. A few of them, though, don't display directly, but are cues to programs that process the page about its content.

Search engines use these meta tags in their effort to discern the meaning of your pages. This issue deals with meta tags, and how they can be used to your advantage. Setting meta tags is the business of your Webmaster, but it's useful for you to understand what's good to do and what's not good to do.

Title Tag

The most important tag for search result position is the title tag. It's displayed in the extreme upper left-hand corner of the page. Site visitors may or may not notice it, but the search engines absolutely do, including Google. Choose an important term that's central to the narrative on the page, and make that the first word of the title tag. Then, if you can work that term into the title tag again, that's a good idea.

You'll see that many sites waste the value of the title tag by using it for their domain name. You'll already get a very high ranking for your domain name. As an example, if your page is about canvas shoes, then a title tag of "Canvas Shoes: Shoes.com--The Finest Canvas Shoes" is a way to work the term into the title tag twice.

Note that this needs to be a term that's central to the narrative that's on the page.

Description Tag

There's also a description meta tag. This provides a summary of the page, that may be used for the summary that the search engine presents to a searcher. Here it's good to have a summary of the content of the page, again using that important search term that you used in the title.
Each important page on your site should have a unique description tag, so that the search engines are given cues to the differences in content between your pages. Google will notice if your descriptions are all the same, and then your descriptions will be given less weight as indicating content of the page.

Keyword Tag

The final meta tag of interest is the keyword tag. This provides a list of important keywords that describe the page. The most common mistake here is to list every word that's possible relevant to the topic of the site. Don't do that; instead, list just three or four important terms that appear in the narrative on the page.

The Bottom Line

Meta tags are another tool you can use to help your site get good position in search engine results. The approach to use is based on understanding how search engines use meta tags to assess the meaning of each page, and helping them find the actual topic of the page.

What Not To Do

Friday, October 23, 2009

There are some shortcuts to achieving high search engine ranking.  These are all methods to make your site appear to have content that's different from what's actually on the site.  If you follow the approach of the previous newsletter, you won't even consider any of these tactics.  And if someone suggests you try them, don't let that person anywhere near your site!  The search engines either have discovered these methods are they are learning about them.

The Basics

A previous issue explained what search engines are trying to do--to show relevant results in response to a query.  If you missed that issue, click here to read it.

There was a time when the search engines were not very sophisticated about identifying techniques for fooling them about content.  There were a number of simple and not so simple methods that, when employed, would get you top ranking in the search engines.

Today many of these techniques are well known.  However, I still have clients who are taken by people who promise quick results with the search engines--and they deliver!  But when the "spamming" is detected, then the site may even be deleted from the search engine index, and receive no traffic for some time!  If your business is dependent on the Internet for much of its volume, such a problem can have tragic consequences.

In this issue I list a number of techniques to watch for.  But as you evaluate people who offer to help with search engine position, keep in mind that it takes time for the search engines to decide that your site is important and give it high rank.  Anyone who promises quick results, or promises a quick specific position, is probably not honest and should be avoided.

Here are some of the more popular techniques:

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing takes many forms.  An early form of it was text in the same color as the background of the page, so that a human reader wouldn't see it but the search engine would.  The page would be "stuffed" with repetitions of the most important search terms.  Needless to say this wasn't very hard for the search engines to discover and check for.  One of my clients lost most of their traffic for about six months because a "friend" told them about this technique and implemented it--for free--as a favor!

More subtle keyword stuffing would be the overuse of a popular term in the text of a page of the site.  Today, search engines do more than count how many times one term appears; they also want other, related terms to appear, and they don't want the important term to appear more than about a half dozen or so times per page--depending, of course, on the length of the page.  The guideline to use is how many times you would use the word in writing for another person, if you wanted to emphasize that word.  Don't do more than that.

Images on your site can have what are called "alt tags" that are displayed when the visitor's mouse hovers over the image.  Don't stuff the alt tags with keywords.  If the image portrays a subject that contains the important term, then use it; but don't make all of the alt tags the same, and don't stuff them with keywords. 

Most of the quick dirty tricks that are used are one or another form of keyword stuffing.  It's called "stuffing" because extra occurrences of keywords are used, in excess of what you would use to write for another human being.  Make sure that you never never never allow anyone to use keyword stuffing of any kind on your site.

Separate Content for Spiders and People Doorway pages and cloaking are used to provide one set of content to spiders and another to human readers.  Technically they use different methods, but the effect is the same:  great risk for your site. Yes, there may be some sneaky way to use these techniques that might give you a good ranking for a short time.  You might even try it and find that you get results--for while.  Again, what this does is put you in a position opposing what the search engines have as their basic objective--delivering pages that are genuinely related to search terms the visitor has entered.  So remember how many smart people are working for Google, remember that many of them are trying to defeat these "content swapping" measures, and don't try to compete with them on this issue that's very important to them.  You won't win. Duplicate Sites, Duplicate Content Recall, again, what the search engines are trying to deliver to their customers--and it'll be obvious to you why you don't want to have duplicate sites!  They don't want to have the content listed twice in their results, so that someone clicking on a series of listings sees the same thing again and again. It's perfectly OK to have a second site.  Think of the many businesses that will have more than one store, stores with different brands and different merchandise for different clientele.  But make sure that the second site is really different and is not just a mirror of the first site.  Make it really different. And be sure that the material you put on your own site is original. Don't fall into that same trap by copying material from another site.  It's not going to help you. The Bottom Line Keep in mind what the search engines are trying to do--show their visitors relevant content--and help them do that with your site.  Stay far away from anyone who recommends a short-cut.  There are short-cuts, but they are very dangerous.  Don't even think about using them!

Tuning Your Pages

Friday, October 9, 2009

Search Engine Position

Everyone wants her site to be on page one of Google for all the search terms important to their business.  Of course, that first page has just ten sites, so there is a lot of competition for that great position.  Just how can you get there?  What's the secret of success?

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The Basics

Last week's issue explained what search engines are trying to do--to show relevant results in response to a query.  If you missed that issue, click here to read it.

If the search engines had people to read sites and rank them, then all that we'd have to do is make our sites quite relevant to the queries of interest, and the human reviewers would make that judgment, and we'd be done.  However, there are too many sites for people to review, so the search engines use computer programs to do the review.  So we can figure out what those programs do, and set up our pages to get favorable results by ranking well with the programs.

But let's pause for a moment.  The goal of those programs is deliver judgments similar to those that a human being would give, and they keep getting better at doing that.  So we have to be careful to use methods that work well with the computer programs, that a human being would also consider contribute to relevance.  In that way, we won't use a technique that works for today but then gets us penalized for bad behavior as the programs get better.

OK, now let's look at the basic areas to address.  An earlier issue talked about how the domain name can help you; if you missed it click here to read it. 

What we'll do is choose one or two relevant search queries for each important page on the site, and make those pages relevant for those terms.

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Meta Tags

The pages of your site are written in html, a markup language that tells the browser how to display the pages.  Within that html are a number of meta tags that are used in various ways.  Of course the search engines see these meta tags, and they use them  as part of their assessment of relevance.

The most important meta tag is the title tag.  It's displayed at the very top of the page, in the colored border of the browser page.  You may not even notice it.  But that tag is very important to Google as a clue to what the page is about.  You should begin the title tag with the important keyword, and use it a second time in the title tag if you can.  For example, for shoes you might try:  "Shoes:  Jones on Main for The Finest Shoes"

This is an important step you can take to improve search engine rank for specific terms.  

There is also a keyword tag and a description tag.  The keyword tag is of limited importance to search engines, but go ahead and use it for the terms that are used on the page that you want to emphasize.  No more than three or four terms.  The description tag is sometimes the summary that the search engine displays in your listing.  So write a custom description for each page, emphasizing the theme of the page and including those key words.

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Word Usage The search engines look for patterns of word usage in the text on your pages in order to tell what the pages are about.  The theory is that if a word is important to the content, then you'll use that word early in the first paragraph, you'll use it a few times in the text, and you'll use it near the end of the text. Don't overdo it; four, five or six usages are enough.  And spread them through 200 words or so of narrative.  You'll notice when you do this that if your narrative is really about a subject, you won't have any trouble mentioning that subject four or five times in the narrative.  So the programmed relevance estimate is really a pretty accurate measure in this case! back to top

Search Engine Position

 

\ Search engines can bring visitors to your site who are actively looking for information that's on your site--what a marketing opportunity that is!  Not only that, the search engines will bring you these visitors for free.  How do you go about getting a good position in search engine results?  How can you get that elusive position on the first page of search engine results for the terms that are most relevant to your offering?  This issue doesn't provide hints or tricks on how to get onto page one--instead, the goal here is to provide a foundation for techniques that will come in later issues.  Here we talk about what search engines try to do as businesses, and which sites the search engines want to put onto page one--the foundation, in my view, for the soundest methods for getting that coveted position. This approach has worked for my clients, time after time, and they can work for you too.  The best way to get the search engines to reward you with a page one position is for you to help them achieve their business goals, a win-win deal. We're happy to announce a new feature of the Newsletter.  If you'd care to discuss this or any past Newsletter, just use the link at the bottom of the page to visit our blog.  There are also links to visit our Web site, unsubscribe, or subscribe, in case you're reading a forwarded copy of this Newsletter.  back to top Search Engines Are Businesses Let's look at what a search engine tries to do, as a business.  The company wants as many people as possible to use the search engine, so that they'll see and react to revenue-generating advertising that's on the site.  So the search engine wants to deliver content that's highly relevant in the listings on page one.  All of the other discussion about what search engines do and don't do has its origins in that one, simple goal--delivering relevant content.  This observation leads to an approach for getting good position in search engine results.  Treat your relationship with search engines as a business relationship.  The best way to succeed in a  business relationships is for each party to meet its own business objectives.  And the best way to succeed with search engines is for your site to help the search engines meet their objectives of delivering relevant content--that is, have a lot of current, relevant content! back to top   What This Means How can we use this approach?   The best way to get good search engine position is to provide a site that the search engine would love to see on page one.  A site that's highly relevant to the topic being searched, a site that presents a lot of fresh content, a site that's referenced by many other sites, especially authoritative sites.  Just provide such a site and you're on your way to page one!  Fundamentally, if you want good search engine position, do this: Put at least 200 words of relevant content on each page of your site; Provide each page with a title that's relevant to its content Regularly add new content to your site Without considering any technical issues, if you follow these three guidelines, your site will rank high in search engine results.  Whether that alone will get you all the way to page one depends on the competitiveness of the particular topic of interest.  In a very competitive topic, you'll need to deal with technical issues as well. back to top Can Technology Help? Of course, a search engine doesn't have a human being to read and judge the relevance of your site's relevance to every query--it uses computer programs for that assessment.  Those programs use measurements that can be automated and used for hundreds of millions of pages; the goal is to approximate human relevance judgments.  If we're clever, we'll understand how these programs make their measurements, and we'll use those measurements as our guide to developing our site. Now the complexity arrives!  Unfortunately, the search engine companies don't tell us how their programs work, so we have to figure them out, largely by trail and error, but also be reading everything the companies tell us, including even their patent applications.  Google has a blog that's useful, and they have Webmaster guidelines that are helpful as well. We can also learn from a wide array of paid and free publications and newsletters.  In my experience, a lot of the iinformaton that's circulated in these forums is not helpful or correct and needs to be viewed through the lens of experience.  Someone who does this work over time gradually learns what works and what doesn't work. Technical measures that are taken to improve search engine position are often labelled white hat and black hat.  White hat techniques attempt to align the site with the search engine's goals, and seek to produce a site that will be judged by search engine software to be what it is.  Black hat methods seek to make the site look more relevant than it is.  These methods involve risk, because the search engines keep refining their methods to discover black hat techniques, because those techniques interfere with the search engines' business objectives, so sites discoveed using these techniques can be seriously penalized. On more than one occasion, my clients have received advice from some friend or "expert" who employed black hat techniques that were discovered by the search engines, resulting in significant losses of traffic for an extended period. Their financial penalities were significant.  In my opinion, trying to fool the search engines is just not worth the risk.  Yes, the methods may work for a while and appear to be a great way to gain business; but getting zero traffic from a major search engine for months is a heavy price to pay. back to top The Bottom Line Improve your search engine position by providing your site with lots of high-quality, relevant content and add more content often.  And don't try to fool the search engines. back to top

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Your Webmaster

The choice of your Webmaster is important, because this person will be developing a valuable business asset.  There is the risk that this choice can be made casually, leading to regret down the road. This issue deals with the choice of a Webmaster.  What qualifications do you need?  How can you find the right person?  And what general approach should you take? Your comments are invited; just click on the "send comment" link at the bottom of the page.  Suggestions for topics for future newsletters are most welcome.  Please feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested.  They can use the "subscribe" link at the bottom to subscribe.  And if you click on the "visit site" link, you can get to all the previous issues of this Newsletter.  And although the prospect makes me sad, there is an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the page in case you don't want to read this Newsletter any more.  back to top Where Do Webmasters Come From? Your choice of a Webmaster is important. This Newsletter outlines some issues for you to consider.  As the Web increases in importance as a promotional and communications method, your site will become ever more important to your business, and your choice of Webmaster, by affecting the effectiveness of your site, can have major impact on your success. A large organization gives the Web site job to their advertising or public relations provider, who has a staff that brings together a lot of disciplines to develop the site.  They spend a lot of money with a company that typically has high costs, but as you can see from a lot of very effective large sites, they can get effective sites as a result. For a smaller organization that doesn't have a single agency supplying them a wide variety of advertising and related services, when the Web site is to be constructed, someone to do it must be identified.  If the company doesn't have this discipline in-house, then an outsider must be found.  What sort of qualifications should a Webmaster have? Often Webmasters come from an artistic background.  They can make something that is beautiful that has wonderful colors and form.  But they often see the site as graphic design, rather than as a communications vehicle, so their designs can be lovely not help the communication or even get in the way of it.  And the artists sometimes may not be as sensitive as we might like to the idea that the words on the site convey the most important part of its meaning. Other Webmasters come from a programming background.  They are even less interested in the communication aspects of the site, and their designs don't look as nice as the graphics people, either.  They see the site as something that does complex operations, and they are likely to have doing complicated things--potentially very well.  You need one of these people if your site is likely to be very complex, collecting and providing data in many ways, or you plan on extremely elaborate graphics.  Today we are starting to see Webmasters who have an educational background in Web design, who understand a Web site as a communication vehicle, and can design it that way from the beginning. That's the ideal background for you to seek.  The generalist who can do enough graphics and enough programming, but who really understands how information can be presented so that visitors can understand it and be persuaded to act.  There are also small companies that can bring together several different people to give you this sort of blended expertise.  But you're better off with a single person who understands the site as a communication vehicle.  back to top Content If you've followed my advice and your site is being developed using Joomla, then you'll be able to have it set up so that you can change content yourself, and you should.  There's no reason to pay a Webmaster, or wait for her to get around to your work, just to change a few sentences. The search engines will give you higher position if you change your content regularly; they want to dish up fresh content for their own customers.  If you can change the site's content yourself, you save the cost of a Webmaster's time to do the work, but more important, you make it easy to change content--whoever in your organization knows the content simply makes the change.  And it's done. You can do a Google search to find Webmasters in your area who specialize in Joomla.  There are plenty of them, including small companies that do excellent work.  Because of the nature of the product, firms that use Joomla tend to not try to milk their customers for all sorts of maintenance, since the customers can do it themselves and generally know it. Visit your Webmaster, see examples of sites that she has developed, call the site owners and find out how satisfied they were with the relationship as the site was developed.  And find out how much they paid.

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Your Newsletter

Publishing a newsletter is simple and inexpensive, and is an important part of your overall Web marketing strategy.  This issue explains why a newsletter is important, helps you in setting your goals for it, provides some warnings and discusses the tools question--that is, should you publish one? This issue has a new format, thanks to Mary Johnson, who didn't like the previous format.  If you like it or not, I'd love to hear from you.  Just click on the "send comment" link at the bottom of the page.  The "visit site" link will take you to the site, where you can read back issues of this newsletter. back to top Why a Newsletter? There's a lot of research suggesting that, in today's crowded advertising market, where we are exposed to company names literally all day long, that we don't even take a new company name or brand seriously until we see it in a credible setting at least seven times.  If you have a nice Web site, and a visitor sees it and likes it, what next?  At the first encounter, the visitor isn't ready to buy.  So now you hope that visitor remembers your URL on first exposure (and what do you think is the chance of that?) or finds you again when searching. But suppose you provided a method for the visitor to tell you "I'm interested but not quite sold.  Please tell me more and remind me of my interest in your site."  Now that visitor can get the remaining six exposures through your newsletter, bringing her to the point of being ready to do business!  However, as they say in the TV ads, there's more!  How would our predecessors in print advertising have enjoyed being able to design a newsletter and then have the prospects pay for the printing and mailing!  That's what the Internet gives us. All we have to do is design it, and the delivery and printing is paid by our prospects! back to top Content The most common mistake that's made in newsletters is to use them to sell!  Yes, it's intended to help make sales, but the purpose isn't to just convey price offers and comeons.  Your visitor isn't ready to buy, or she would have bought on the last visit.  You're selling at a distance, so you need to build up confidence and familiarity.  Make the visitor comfortable with you and your company, so that purchase (or other transaction that you seek) will happen. In the newsletter, convey information about the organization, how it does business, the sort of service that's provided, and the staff.  Give the kind of information that a physical visitor would get by coming into your store, looking around, and saying hello to your staff.  Find interesting stories to tell.  Readers of your newsletter who like it will be grateful if you follow a consistent pattern with your newsletters.  Perhaps you have an introduction that surveys the content, one or two sections about the content, and then a summary.  Like this newsletter!  Or you might have a section about your company--or your area of business--in the news.  You might always then talk about a new feature that you've added.  And then introduce one staff member.  Remember, each of these visitors has left an "I'm interested" card with you.  Now it's your job to provide them the right information so that they can make the decision to buy.  When they do decide to buy, they're likely to come in a regular price--there's no reason to expect that they didn't buy at first because of price. Which is why you don't want to put price offer after price offer in your newsletter--all that does is reduce confidence in your price structure. back to top A Warning Be careful with your subject line. There are a number of programs between you and your subscribers that are looking for unwanted email, and they will dump your wonderful newsletter right into the bit bucket if they don't like it! One good word to avoid entirely in the subject line is free.  That word  by itself can get your newsletter not delivered.  And don't put exclamation points into the subject line either, for the same reason. back to top Tools If you know me, you know that I use tools for as much of my work as possible.  I have limited time to get it done, so I'm happy to pay for something that makes the work go faster. I prefer a mailing list tool that runs on my own PC.  A hosted service is OK, but you pay every time you use it.  With a PC tool, you pay just once.  Your email service from your own site can send your newsletters, but then you have a lot of setup to do if you want to change ISPs.  I found a mailing list tool that runs on my PC and handles subscribes and unsubscribes without bothering me.  It has an html editor so that I can easily compose newsletters.  It's called Mail List King, and it's from Xequte software.  They have a range of good products that are not expensive, and they keep making them better. But what I like may not be what you like.  Try a few different mailing list tools, and decide what appeals to you.  The goal is to find something you like to use so that you can establish a regular pattern of getting the newsletters out and a pattern of content that your readers will come to know. back to top The Bottom Line I hope that this issue has convinced you that you need a newsletter!  If you don't have one, then you are letting your half-sold visitors off the hook, to be sold by another site that offers them a newsletter.

visit site     send a comment      unsubscribe. Web Marketing Advantage - 8833 Harness Trail, Potomac, Md.  20854  301 983-0452 Copyright 2009, David C. Roberts Unlimited permission to copy and forward this document is given provided that it is copied in full and attributed to http://webmarketingadvantage.com

Your Domain Name

As you plan your Web presence, an issue to deal with early on is your domain name.  So let's talk domain names!  There are a few things that you ought to know about it.

To get to your Web site, visitors type in http:// followed by your domain name.  You need to choose a domain name that's available and list it with a registrar.  Then it's yours.  To find out which domain names are available, go to the site of a domain name registrar, such as Network Solutions, and do a search.  You can also purchase the domain name there, if it's available.  If you'd like to purchase a domain name that's owned by someone else, that process is more complicated and expensive.  Good domains sell for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on the resale market.

Network Solutions is the oldest registrar of domain names, and they are one of the most expensive.  But the cost difference ma be ten or twenty dollars a year between the most and least expensive, so that's not a reason for choosing one or the other.  As the most established registrar, it is possible that Network Solutions is likely to have more customer service and a better dispute resolution procedure in case some sort of dispute develops.  That's not a guarantee that you won't have trouble, but it could be a reason to register with them.

Can your choice of domain names help or hurt your position in search engine results?  You bet it can!  Do some Google searches on a few terms you dream up, and look at the results.  You'll find that very often, the sites in the first positions in the search results have domain names that include or even match the query you entered!  It's quite evident that Google uses the domain name as an indication of what the site is about.  If you can find a domain name that includes a popular search term in the topical area of your site, then that's the way to go.  Notice that my own domain name starts with webmarketing; that's no accident, since web marketing is one of the terms used frequently for searches.  My site doesn't have very good search engine position yet, though, because my promotion campaign for it has just started.

If you're fortunate enough to choose a domain name that echoes an important search term, you'll save a lot of promotion effort getting good search engine position.  However, these days we often find that the best domain names are taken, and we have to be content with something else.

You don't have to have a domain name that ends in .com.  Consider .org or .info if they suit the purpose of the site.  Or if you're a business site, there's always .biz.  And often you'll find that .us is available; the suggestion that you're nationwide can't really hurt.  Yes, we all want .com, but the other domains are a good way to have those keywords you want.

You're going to put serious money and time into promoting your domain name, so it will become a valuable business asset.  That makes it worthy of your personal protection.  It's a good idea for you to personally register your own domain name, pay for it yourself, and register yourself as all of the contacts.  Many businesses that have sites let their Webmaster handle the registration.  But if you might want to change Webmasters, if they've registered your site, they are in control of your domain name and the site.  Or suppose there's a disagreement about an invoice from the Webmaster.  If you don't pay the disputed invoice, your Webmaster could take your site off the air, and you'd have no quick recourse.  So keep the registration in your own name and control it personally.  Consider all the resources that you're putting into building the site and building its reputation, and you'll realize that your Web site is a significant asset that you must control personally.

Finally, when you register your domain name, be sure to register it for at least ten years.  One good reason for doing this is that you won't face the nuisance of needing to renew the registration every year, with the risk that you'll overlook it and lose your domain name.  But even if you're perfectly organized and won't forget to renew, note that Google uses the length of registration of your domain name as one indication of how committed you are to the business.  If the owner is willing to pay for a ten-year registration, then this is a serious site--deserving of higher search engine position--at least in Google's opinion.  So go for a ten-year registration.  An added benefit is that it's cheaper per year than a shorter registration.

The Bottom Line--Choose a domain name that includes important search terms, register it yourself in your own name with yourself as all of the contacts, and register it for at least ten years.

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