“It's
easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.”
~ Tom Brokaw ~
“Search
Engine Optimisation To Improve Website R.O.I.”
Practical
steps for generating targeted search traffic to your website.
A
Whitepaper by Paul Miles – Dec 2003
Executive Producer, PiXEL iNK MEDiA Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia |
Meta
tags
A Meta tag is a coding statement placed
near the top of the HTML of a webpage, as part of that page’s
heading. They describe content aspects of the web page and are used
by search engines when adding a page to their index. They are placed
between the <head>…</head> tags within the HTML
code of your webpage.
In years gone by, these
tags were the key criteria for how search engines determined what
your website was about and where it ranked. These days, the tags
are no longer quite as significant but they are still very important.
Most search engines display the information in the Meta tags with
the search results, so you should make them attractive to give yourself
the best chance of people clicking through to your site.
Some search engines and
directories don’t accept submissions with ALL CAPS in the
title or in Meta tags, so be sure to use upper and lower case. Well-written
Meta tags will certainly help a page to rank higher, so it is important
that you use your keywords and key-phrases in them. So what are
the most important tags?
Title tag
The title tag of your site should have your most important keywords
in it. Failure to put keywords in the title tag is the number one
reason why relevant webpages may still have a poor ranking with
search engines.
Your title should be relatively
short and attractive, like a newspaper or magazine headline. Build
it around your main key-phrases and try to keep it under 40 characters,
as that improves your ‘keyword density’ and seems to
work best. Try to place these key-phrases as close to the start
of the tag as possible for maximum return. Here is an example <title>Buy
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Melbourne Australia</title>
Keywords
Your keywords Meta tag lists the words and key-phrases that best
describe the contents of your page and define which search terms
apply to your webpage. They are added to the HTML code of your webpage
in this form <Meta name="keywords" content="buy
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver, Melbourne Australia, cheap
Macromedia Dreamweaver software, 2004 Macromedia Dreamweaver MX,
Dreamweever">
Your primary key-phrase
should be at the start. Using your keywords in a combination of
phrases about five times seems to work well, but try different combinations.
Repeating the most important keyword twice can work with some search
engines, but beware, as repeating it more is likely to cause some
to not index your whole page or site. Most search engines also tend
to ignore lists longer than 1024 characters.
Description
The description Meta tag is a quick, brief, one or two sentence
description of the page; a synopsis of about 50 words max. The text
in this field gets used for display to the user in the search results
page of most search engines, so make it attractive and accurate
to encourage click-throughs.
Again, bear your keyword
density and positioning in mind for this text. Don’t write
it like a review as the editors of search engine directories are
likely to edit it before it gets added. Here is a good example <Meta
name="description" content="Shop to buy Macromedia
Dreamweaver from Melbourne Australia. Cheap Macromedia Dreamweaver
software including 2004 Macromedia Dreamweaver MX.">
Other tags
The above three tags are your only tags worth optimising. There
have been other tags used over the years but these are rarely factored
into today’s search engine algorithms. Whilst adding them
normally won’t penalise your ranking, there are certainly
more effective tasks you can allocate your time to.
Comment tags are ‘hidden
remarks’ in the HTML code of your webpage that do not display
on screen, and it seems that sites ranking higher often include
a line of Comments very similar to their description or title tag.
For example, <!-- Buy Macromedia Dreamweaver, Melbourne Australia
-->. Again, this can have a very minor positive effect on your
ranking.
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© 2004
PiXEL iNK MEDiA Pty. Ltd. ABN 94 105 177 099. All rights reserved.
