Free web site promotion – Article 2 in the series

Page Titles, Meta Keyword Tags & Meta Description Tags

Okay, so we’ve selected the most relevant key word or phrase for our web site. And that key word (or phrase) is also one that is searched for a lot. Great – it’s a terrific start to have the right key word.

What we’ll do now is start to have a look at how we optimise a page to be attractive to the search engine. By ‘optimise’ I mean develop the page so that it ranks high for the key word or phrase we selected.

But before we get started, be aware that what I’m about to tell you is only 1 part of the jigsaw. It’s not “Do this and that’ll be it”. It’s “Do this and then we’ll move onto what I call the off-page factors.

On page factors - stuff on the page – that influences search engine rankings are numerous. So let’s start at the top.

Page Title

Page Title is a one of the most crucial bits of information on your site. A good Page Title can be the difference between a high search engine ranking or a low ranking. It’s that critical.

With the Page Title you’re giving the search engines – and the reader – a description of what your site is about. And, of course, it’s the title that shows up in the search engine results – so it has to make sense to the reader because that’s the person you want to click on the link.

And the Page Title should contain the keyword pr phrase you are targeting.

What I try and do with pages I’m optimising for search engines is keep the title nice and short. Think of the search engines as giving weight to each word in the title. Take a look at the title of this page – “Free web site promotion – Article 2 in the series”

That’s an okay title, but not great. If we count up the words in the title we have 6. So each of those words contributes 16.6% to the weighting given to the title.

Following on from that, if I was optimising this page for “free web site promotion” (I’m not, I’m using that term as the example of the page for a couple of reasons) then 4 out of 6 words would be counted as being relevant to that term.

What The Search Engine Wants

That’s good, but it’s not as good as being 4 words out of 5….or 4 words out of 4….BUT if you just use the key word or phrase it’s going to ’sound’ silly to the person reading – and what the search engines want is the exact same thing the reader wants – quality information.

And if you do use the exact key word or phrase as your Page Title then you’ll miss picking up rankings for funny searches such as – with this Page Title as the example – “free site article”.

Get your key word or phrase into the title, but do it in such a way that it’s descriptive of the page and makes sense for anyone reading (search engine or person). That’s the important part.

Meta Tags – All But Dead

I’ll talk here of 2 meta tags. Firstly, the meta keyword tag. The meta keyword tag I’ve put on this page is in the source code towards the to:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”free web site promotion” />

Again, we’ll use the key word or phrase we are targeting.

That’s the meta keyword tag. It’s basically useless (it used to be used to tell a search engine what keyword the web page was targeting, along with a way to increase what’s called the keyword count. But overuse by spammers has resulted in the search engines now ignoring the meta keyword tag in assessing page relevancy).

None of the major search engine support meta keyword tags anymore. Yahoo! apparently uses the meta tag in case a page does not have the word, but that’s an incredibly rare event).

My Recommendation… And Why I Still Use Meta Keyword Tags

My recommendation is to include a meta keyword tag that is the keyword (or phrase) you are targeting – perhaps using a misspelling. If the word or phrase you are targeting is not very competitive (i.e. very few web sites are targeting the phrase) then you might, just might show up for the misspelling because of the meta ekeyword tag. But don’t expect it to have any relevance.

(The reason I use meta keyword tags – and I’ll generally just use the phrase I’m targeting on a page – is because I’m lazy! I figure the meta keyword tag doesn’t do any harm and one day meta keyword tags might come back into favour with some search engines?? Then I won’t have to go back through thousands of pages and insert a meta keyword tag!)

Meta Description Tag – A Little Life Still

Whilst the meta description tag isn’t used by the search engines in their ranking of a web page, the importance of this tag comes in the fact that the description will sometimes show up in the search engines ’snippet’ of information below the page title when displaying results.

The ’snippet’ provided by Google when you search for “Rob Mills the singer” is:

“… phrase “Rob Mills the singer” into Google you’ll get these results returned…. People searching for “Rob Mills the singer” won’t be interested in the …”

Different search engines use the meta description tag differently – some use display it all the time, others display it sometimes, and others still display it if the searched for term isn’t on the page.

As you can see in the “Rob Mills the singer” example, Google has taken the ’snippet’ from the text on the page that contains the phrase the person has searched for.

It’s been my experience that having the key word or phrase show up in the ’snippet’ display is crucial in getting the visitor to click on your listing and come visit your site.

Sure, place you key word or phrase in the meta description tag but also ensure that the description reads well and makes sense. use different descriptions on each page – just like what I have on this page is different to what I have on article 1 in this series. After all, the search engines will only display 1 (maybe 2) pages from a web site for a particular search – so it makes sense to share the key words or phrases around.