SEO – step one – Meta tags.
Meta tags were one of things you always needed to get really right to get your site ranked well, as times have moved on and software becomes cleverer they are less important, although still useful search engines, like google, will now spider (read) your site and look for frequently used words to assist with ranking and rely less on meta tags, but it is still a useful practice to go through from an SEO point of view.
As a very loose rule of thumb the following meta data was needed
- <title>A Title For Your Page</title> – usually displayed as the clickable link in the listings
- <description>A description of what the page contained, could be longer and would appear below the title on the search engine listings</description>
- <keywords>a,comma,separated,list,of,key,words,on,your,page,that,should,not,contain,multiple,repetitions,of,words,beyond,three</keywords>
Of course you could ignore this and not have any of them, but the search engines would just grab some text and use that instead (in the case of the title and description) and do their best to work out what keywords to use.
These days spidering has evolved to the point that many search engines no longer need keywords and prefer to read your pages. However I feel this data is still important to keep, if nothing else, for the smaller sites that do still use them.
Consider then, a title, description and set of keywords – maybe choose 20 per page, for each page of your site. Not too much work, and you can lift a lot of it from the pages themselves.
Beyond this there are other meta tags; comments, refresh, robots, and lots more beside.
I would recommend that you at least include the following;
- <meta name=”robots” content=”INDEX,FOLLOW”> – which, if you follow the associated link, you will find that it serves no purpose, that being true you lose nothing to include it! Historically this tag told search engines to spider each page linked to the page the tag is on – in essence you could have setup a home page with links to all other pages on the sites, included this tag and let it tell the search engine software what to do. Kind of like a depreciated tag now, in that it’s used less, but as with keywords, I would still include it.
- <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ /> – this is the encoding standard for Western Europe and although less preferred it is one you can set easily (unless you really want to delve into the realms of .htaccess, which you don’t just now!)
There are many other meta tags but few do anything of any real use. Some coders will put their contact details on there – I think that’s a sneaky practice as there is usually an agreement between designer and client to have a link back to the designer, but then to sneak it into the meta of every page as well? A bit underhand.
In any case, our company sites are designed in-house and as such don’t have the need.
So, lets look at an example. The following page; http://www.islesofscilly-travel.co.uk/timetable_sc3.asp is the timetable for the Scillonian III, the meta tags for that page are;
<head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>Scillonian III sailing times and dates for 2011 Season - Isles of Scilly Travel</title> <meta name="Description" content="Isles of Scilly Travel - BOOK ONLINE to travel by air or sea to the Isles of Scilly. Skybus flights and Scillonian III sailings available. "> <meta name="Keywords" content="steamship, skybus, scillonian, isles of scilly, scilly, scillies, islands, ios, travel, plane, ship, gry, boat, marys, mary's, tresco, martins, agnes, bryher, flying, sailing, sail, daytrip, sea, air, penzance, bristol, exeter, lands end, southampton, airfield, airline, aerodrome, quay"> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW"> </head>
If you google “scillonian iii sailing times” you should find the page is top of the list, not really hard as the search term is a unique phrase, but notice what accompanies it.
So the clickable link text is taken from the page title – and if anything looking at that it appears to be to long, but it’s not so long that you can’t actually make out what the page is about. Interestingly the description of the page is pulled from the text on the page, so the description meta tag is not used in this instance – but if you were to google the description text you would also find the page. Also note that within the URL (web address) the word time is in bold as it forms part of our search – try searching for “timetable_sc3” and see what you get.
Since a great part of what makes a website attractive is it’s content you have to be on the money with it, you need to understand the tools available to you and how to use them. A good developer should do this for you, but you won’t see a great amount of value in it, but a good designer might not, you could have an amazing website but be in a really competitive industry and never get trade from the web and spend time wondering why.
Meta tags are important then? Yes. But so is great content, you also need to update it regularly, there are other considerations like social media, etc, but we’ll get to that. Initially you need to provide your site with 1) content and 2) meta data.
It’s at this point that I have a shameful admission to make. islesofscilly-travel.co.uk has the same description meta on each page. Why? Well it’s simple. The current site was a face-lift rather than a new build, so some of the code was copy-pasted from the original pages. Hence all of this, I am systematically going through the whole site to try to improve the content.
There used to be a guide that if you manage to get a key word in; your title, your keywords, your url and your page (first 10 words) that it would be enough to get the page a high rank. Since software sophistication has moved on so much and the sheer number of websites that are out there now this simply doesn’t work any more the crawling/spidering software of a search engine has an algorithm that unlikely to be widely known for obvious reasons.
With all of that out of the way this is how I’m planning on implementing my meta (we will stick with the timetable page as an example);
<head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>Scillonian III sailing times and dates for 2011 Season - Isles of Scilly Travel</title> <meta name="Description" content="The Scillonian III passenger ferry sails to St Marys, Isles of Scilly, from 26 March to 29 October in 2011. Details of all times/dates and any other useful information."> <meta name="Keywords" content="steamship, skybus, scillonian, isles of scilly, scilly, scillies, islands, ios, travel, plane, ship, gry, boat, marys, mary's, tresco, martins, agnes, bryher, flying, sailing, sail"> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> </head>
There is something I’ve not covered here, but that really deserves it’s own post (and will get it in due course!), and that is Google Analytics. This is a free service from google that collects usage statistics about your website and reports back to you. This is extremely useful data when it comes to figuring out how effective your websites are, you get an interface with charts and custom reports by email, it’s a good package.
Anyway, our timetable_sc3.asp page received 12,904 pageviews between Feb 26 and Mar 28 2011. A nice amount of hits, thank you very much! (7,969 unique). Of those only a very small number (in the 100s) accessed the page from another page, most came direct (from search engine, bookmark, etc) that means that page is a high-volume landing page (in relation to the rest of the site) – and at the moment it has very little content other than the timetables – so a job for us moving forward is to add some more content in there, to entice visitors to check out other pages of the site. (remember, SEO is concerned with keeping people on your site as well as attracting them in the first place!).
The main point is how those people arrived – well I can see that too – 5,911 pageviews via google, 211 direct (bookmarked), 118 via aol and the rest in dribs and drabs. That being the case I can delve further into the data and see that the search term “scillonian” gave us 2,003 pageviews, “isles of scilly travel” 499, “scilly isles ferry” 476, “scillonian timetable” 439, “scillonian co uk” 259 and “scillonian ferry” 162.
I know this might be brain bending for some but what stands out straight away is that we don’t use the word “ferry” anywhere on our page!
And that is in essence how you analyse your page for missing content. We should now aim to try to fit the f-word in there somewhere. The actual construction of the timetables page is not the best as it doesn’t really contain any text other than titles and a few lines of conditions. We also have a great bit of white-space on the right-hand side, under our booking panel, which could be used to include lots of extra info. All in good time!
Back to SEO and meta. My aim, with this page at least, is to get a paragraph of text on this page. Shorten the number of keywords and get a description that actually tells a surfer what the page is about.
This needs to be applied for each and every page. But is only the start. Next we will move on to content and keeping things fresh.
http://www.search-marketing.info/meta-tags/index.htm
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/charset.html
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70897#1