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Title Tags and Metatags. Making a Search Engine Friendly Website Presenting a website and / or web page according to the protocols and rules so it is made available to be indexed by the search engines and therefore found by the searching public. Having a website is one thing, being found is another. You have to put in the signposts that tell the search engines your site exists and what your site is all about. It is kind of scary that businesses spend many thousands of dollars to build a site then omit to tell the search engines that the site and its contents exist. View Video Many believe, that when they type into the search engine search box the words they are searching by, the search engine goes out into the Web and brings back the information. This is not the case, each search engine searches its own database and provides to the searcher the information the website owners' have previously advised to the search engine. For a website to be found by the search engines and searching customers, words and phrases must appear in the correct places on and behind the website. It is the matching of these words and phrases that enable the site to be recognised by the search engines as what the customer is searching for. Each search engine has its own rules as to what they consider important for ranking purposes but to index, all search engines "look" at the web page elements, the page text and the tags behind the page. The Title Tag in the coding behind the webpage should be descriptive and accurately reflect what the page is about. The words used should be what a viewer will use when they search. Think of the words a customer would key into a search engine search box when they wish to find your site and put these words / key phrases in your Title Tag. Each page of your site is an entry point, optimize for what each page targets. Each page has different content so use different words and phrases in the title tag for each page, matching them to the content of the page. Example: The words accountant and accountants are two different words, a person searching may key in the word accountant, but if the title tag on each page said accountants, the site has just limited its ability to be found. It would be better to have the word accountant in the Title tag on one page and accountants on another and so not limit the customers ability to find the site. And if the business also engaged in farm accounting, is a tax consultant or specialises in small business accounting put these words in the title tags providing the words also appear in the on-page text It is like reverse engineering. Consider the words or phrases a searcher would type into a search engine search box if you were looking for your website or wished to find information about the products and services you offer. Are these the words used in your website Title Tag (s) To Check To view the tags behind a website or web page in Internet Explorer, load the website into the browser, click on "View" in the top toolbar and from the drop down box select "Source". With the Title Tag you have about 70 characters on each page with which to attract the searcher. Make them, in the Title Tag descriptive of your business, accurate, and relative to the content of the web page and more people will find your site. In addition to an accurate and descriptive "Title Tag" a well constructed Meta Tag "Description" is advantageous, as it allows you the influence the description of your page in the search engine results pages. The Description Tag is a précis of what the page is about; usually written in one or two logical sentences of about 150 characters. Use words and phrases that appear in the on-page text. Some search engines place less weight on this tag and use selected text from the page in the search engine result pages, while others will return the information shown in the tag or a mixture of both the page and tag information. When writing the description tag incorporate the key phrases which appear in the on page text. (The Keyword Tag is usually not of interest to the search engines these days) Using the information obtained from the tags and the page text the search engine then indexes / records information for use when a viewer types an enquiry into the search engine search box. Non existent, incorrect tag information and sparse on page text means the search engine is unable to supply the information a viewer requests, which is not good for the business. It therefore pays to check to see if your website is search engine friendly. The correct tags and the information contained within them is the responsibility of the website owner not the website developer and should have been part of the decision process "what is to be written on the page, who are we targeting, what information is the searcher looking for". Content is King, write copious, concise, relevant information about the products or services you provide. Consider the key phrases a customer will use when searching. Weave these phrases into your writing. This exercise will allow you to select the most appropriate words for your title and description tags. Search engines are in the business of providing quality information. Provide them with quality information so they can provide it to the viewers and your business will benefit. The video that follows "seo copywriting" (give it time to load) has pertinent information about writing copy for the search engines. In the interview, mention is made of taking the key phrases from the page (s) and placing them in the title tag (s). I trust / hope that the state of the communication system in New Zealand will allow you to view. You can also view the video and others via the header above the video, all dealing with SEO, making a website friendly for both the search engines and customers. Snap Someone said it was like playing the kids card game of Snap. Cards of different value (numbers words or pictures) are put down in turn until a comparison is made. Snap, someone wins With the Internet, the cards the businesses hold are the web pages, each page having words or key phrases in the Tags and text. The cards the public holds are the words or phrases they key into the search engines. The customer is looking for the web pages with words or phrases that correspond with the words and phases they are searching for. If the website tags and text are not descriptive and accurate there can be no Snap There are many articles about tags and the following is just but one. If there is one important factor in building a search engine friendly website apart good content and it is to make the words in the Title Tag applicable to what the customer is likely to type when they use the search engine search box to find your website. Metatags and SEO by Eric Enge The role of meta tags is misunderstood by some members of the webmaster community. I still have people who are not in the business come up to me and talk about SEO as if it's all about picking keywords metatags. I try not to cringe when I get into these discussions. I once had an idea for an article about this. The article was going to be completely blank. Only those that were enterprising enough to look at the source would have seen the content of the article in the keyword metatags: (meta name="keywords" content="keywords, metatags, do, not, matter" /) I have built tons of high ranking sites and not implemented any keywords meta tags at all. Even so, I do suppose that there may be some search engines that examine the keyword metatags, and it may matter some. It's just that there are better places to spend your time than customizing the keywords metatag. The fundamental reason for search engines paying little heed to the keyword meta tag is that spammers abused it in the early days of SEO. Search engines prefer to focus all of their attention on "user visible" text. The user can't see the keywords metatags unless they view the source of your web page. It's this invisible aspect that makes the keywords meta tag so attractive for a spammer to abuse it. So what about metatags in general? This article will provide an overview of their value and the best way to use them. Title Tag Put this in the bank. The title tag is the single most important "on page" element in telling a search engine what your page is all about. Yes, the title tag is incredibly important. During the design of your site, you should have decided on the best keywords for each of your pages. For each page, you should use the most important keywords (note: keywords means "search phrases" as used in this article) in your title tag. For example, if the most important keyword for your page is "blue widgets", you may use a title tag such as: (title) Blue Widgets from Blue Widget Manufacturing (/title) You can emphasize more than one keyword, but should limit it to no more than 3, as follows: (title) Blue Widgets, Round Blue Widgets, and Square Blue Widgets (/title) Note that we trimmed off the company name in this example. There are some SEOs that recommend that it's best to keep your title tag to 70 characters or less. Our opinion is that longer title tags are probably not harmful, but the extra characters are ignored by some search engines. Given that the extra characters are ignored, we tend to keep ours less than 70 characters. Description Metatag This metatag also sees limited use by search engines. Like the keywords metatag, it is not generally speaking user visible. I know of no search engine that considers the content of the description metatag for page ranking purposes. However, under certain circumstances, a search engine may use your description metatag as the description of your page that it displays in search results. Yahoo, for example, does this if it can't find enough text on your page to develop a good page summary on its own. For that reason, you should make sure that you write a good description metatag for your pages. Since this description may show up in the search results shown by search engines, you want the description to be well written enough that it will help entice the user to click on the link to your site instead of a link to someone else's site. Keep the description metatag crisp, just a few lines of text. Don't stuff it with keywords. Remember, search engines do not use this tag for ranking purposes. Write something that tells the user why they should come to your page - what benefit will they get by doing so. Straightforward, basic marketing. Here is a simple example: (meta name="description" content="Blue Widgets: Low Cost, High Quality Blue Widgets available for Order Online. Delivered to your Doorstep in 48 hours or less." /) Keywords Metatag So should you implement a keywords metatag? Sure. Just don't agonize over it. Take the top 3 or 4 keywords that you decided to target your page for, put them in the keywords metatag, and move on. There are dozens of other factors in the design and implementation of your page that are more important to spend your time on. For illustration purposes only we have used opening and closing brackets instead of the usual angle brackets in the above examples Summary Understanding how to use metatags can be useful. However, far too many webmasters agonize about the keyword metatags and the description metatag. By all means, come up with a decent strategy for them, and you will benefit. Just don't make it the focus of your SEO efforts. The SEO wars are won primarily with content and links. About the Author Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com. Stone Temple Consulting is proud to have been selected as a Launch Partner for Google's Custom Search Engine announcement read more at www.stonetemple.com Google's guideline for webmasters can be found at www.google.com/support/webmasters Content management Systems CMS The following is taken from a paper on www.stepforth.com and deals with some issues faced when using Content Management Systems (CMS). Of note is the definite possibility that unless the CMS is of standard and implemented properly, the search engine spiders will be wary of crawling the website. If spiders are wary of a website it will not be indexed to the level required and a non-indexed site becomes nothing more than a pretty picture no one can find. Quote from Matt "session ids can be poison for crawlers" QUESTION: Which steps should I follow when optimizing my dynamic website?. To be certain of the particular answer for you I would need to know more about your website so I will provide a list of what I would term the most common steps to optimizing a dynamic website that utilizes a shopping cart. URL's: Banish those ugly dynamic URL's and open your website to the search engines. Accomplish this by using a rewrite such as ISAPI_rewrite on Windows servers or a mod_rewrite on Apache servers. This tweak will provide search engines with an easier route to follow through your website. Why? When search engine spiders visit a website and find dynamic URL's there is a high likelihood that the website will not be fully spidered. This is because search engine spiders are trained to avoid the possibility of getting caught in a loop when indexing a website. For example, what if a search engine spider was indexing a website and found a dynamic calendar? Theoretically this spider could go on forever indexing the calendar, day after day. As a consequence, spiders place a limit on the depth that they will index a dynamic website; usually 3 levels. Here is a sample of a bad URL and a fixed URL: Unfriendly URL: (filename.php?id=F98ZF4&productId=39222§ion=wicked&brand=582&template=53) Search engine friendly URL: (http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/board53/ ) In short, by making your website's URLs appear static the higher the likelihood that your website will be properly indexed. Once this fix has been applied optimize your website for rankings. Titles and Meta Description Tag : Common in my world of SEO consultation is dealing with Content Management Systems (CMS) that do not allow for product/page specific title or Meta Description tags. These lower quality CMS end up using the same title and Meta Tags on every page within the website; this is the kiss of death for search engine rankings. If you are serious about obtaining top rankings you need to either increase the functionality of your CMS to provide title and description customization or switch to an alternative, more search engine friendly CMS. Title Tags: A page title must concisely correspond to the ranking target for the page that it is on; after all it is used as the title for any ranking you obtain so it should be highly relevant. How this is done is up to you and the degree in which your CMS is setup for search engines. For example, excellent search engine friendly shopping carts such as Product Cart and Apple Pie Shopping Cart already incorporate the automation of optimized titles based on the product or page you are on within your website. If your system does not have this innate automation then the best option that comes to mind is to have additional functionality added to your website to allow automation. You can usually hire the maker of the software to make this addition. Description Tags: The Description Tag is often used as the description for any search engine ranking a page obtains. As a result, this content must be highly relevant and engaging; to get users to click and visit the page. Fortunately the higher end SEO friendly carts (linked to above) already provide automated Description Tag functionality with the option to override automation with a custom Tag on a page-by-page basis. If your system does not offer automation and/or customization then you should again consider hiring an informed programmer include it. Note: Keyword Tags are not mentioned here because of their vastly diminished importance in the world of search engine optimization. The fact is that search engines are paying little (if any) attention to this tag. In fact, I would venture that the Keyword Tag is ignored unless it is being used to SP@M in which case it will produce negative affect. So my tips generally do not include Keyword Tag advice - just FYI. Firstsearch Home