Websites Under Your Control Blog

We get asked repeatedly about adding "meta tags" to websites, usually the "keywords" meta tag.

Let's deal with the myth first. Meta tags don't help your search results in Google.  Period, stop, done, over and out.

All the major search engines stopped looking at the keyword tag in 1997, when the "adult" website industry started stuffing innocuous but popular search phrases into their website meta tag keywords, to hijack searches.

The only meta tag that Google looks at that we care about today is the description tag.

How is the description tag used? Google will randomly select snippets of text from your web page and display that as the text in their search results.

If you add a description tag, then Google will throw that description into the mix, along with whatever random snippets it finds on your page.

That's all. It won't boost your ranking at all.

According to Google's Matt Cutts, "Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking."

So, meta tag keywords? Don't waste your time. 

Meta tag description? As a low-priority task, put some creative and compelling text there, and it will show up once in a while in Google's results.

To add text to the description meta tag (or the keywords tag, if you really want to cover all bases), just click on "Add meta data to Web Page" link in your Online Business Partner page editor.

Then, type the text you want to be occasionally used by Google when it displays your page in search results, and click "Publish".  You are done.

(If you're not using our Online Business Partner, check with your webmaster, who will be able to revise your site to add a description tag.)

This won't get you higher up on Google, but it will give you a chance to provide one more bit of compelling text, so when people see it, they won't be able to resist clicking on your link in Google!

(Of course, don't fib. Google can get pretty cranky when you try to trick them!)

We get asked occasionally about optimizing for Yahoo, Bing, and others, rather than Google.

As with any expenditure of time and money, you have to decide where to do your spending.

As of today, Google owns the search world, without question. As you can see from the following graph, Google has 85%, Yahoo and Bing split 10%, Baidu (Chinese language search engine) has 3%, and the remaining 2% is divided among thousands of search engines competing for the crumbs... so why even think about anything other than Google? Go where the searchers go!

Source: NetMarketShare

 

The purpose of search engine optimization is to get traffic to your pages, but your site must be written and formatted for those who visit.

Your headlines serve both purposes. The visual formatting makes the headlines stand out to your visitors. The designation of some text as a headline (using "heading tags") makes it stand out to Google and other search engines. For both, the headlines make it immediately obvious what topics are covered on your page.

How to make a headline

Headline levels, defined using "heading tags," can be numbered from 1 to 6, with 1 being the most important in terms of indexing.

For best results, place the main topic of your page in "heading 1" tags, and the subtopics in "heading 2" tags. If you care about Google showing the page, use words in the headlines that your visitors are likely to search for.  For example, a headline such as About Our Company informs your human visitors what is to follow, but a headline that says you are a company "serving the needs of North Texans needing ambulatory and wheelchair transport" is more informative, and certainly helped Preston Trail Transport to reach the first page of Google. Notice how it tells what they do, and where they do it.

If you use our Online Business Partner^® service, just log in and open your page, click in the relevant text, and click to set the heading in the tool bar. Otherwise, contact your webmaster with your instructions.

The bottom line: Optimize your pages with well-written content that uses important keyword phrasing in the headlines. It is one of the easiest ways to improve your search engine results.

Someone defined "insanity" as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

If you try that in Google, you might actually get those different results - but don't worry, it's not you!

A few days ago we blogged about the need for titles on web pages, and while doing so, we searched for a handful of different phrases to find the most illustrative example for our screen shots.

First we searched for "health insurance frisco tx" and then "physical therapy frisco tx" before finding what we wanted when searching for "pizza frisco tx."

On the third search, we saw Google results that included items from the previous searches, totally unrelated to "pizza." See the screen shot at the right.

(The screen shot was fortunate, because trying to replicate this several times resulted in a different set of links each time.)

So no, you are not losing touch with reality -- Google really does vary its results on one search based on what you searched for previously.

This means that your results will vary from one search to another even on the same topic, and if you are on the phone with someone telling them to Google something, their results might very well vary from yours, even at the same time.

 

In website terminology, the "title" is the text that appears at the very top of your browser window when you visit a web page, such as the white text in the blue Internet Explorer window shown here. In tabbed browsers, the page title also appears in the tab.

It's not merely cosmetic!

Search engines use the title as the most significant indicator of what that web page is about, and also as the headline for your entry in their search results.

Note the entry for Palio's on the first page in Google for a search I did for "pizza frisco tx"...



Don't leave your web page with a nondescript title like "home page" -- make it meaningful, and include the 3-5 words that your ideal customers are most like to search for, and you will dramatically improve your search engine visibility!

How you set the title on your website will depend on what tools you have at your disposal to make changes.

If, like Palio's, you are using our Online Business Partner®, just login, go to the web page details screen, and type in the title -- that's all there is to it! (Not using our service? Check with your webmaster for an estimate for changing the title on each page.)

(By the way, Palio's makes awesome pizza, voted best in Frisco! Go visit, and tell 'em we sent you!)

Snowball Express is dedicated to helping the children of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces since 9/11.

On December 16th through December 20th of this year, Snowball Express will host 2000 children and surviving spouses in Southern California, from all across America, for an all-expense paid holiday gathering none of them will ever forget.

The Snowball Express website not only needs to tell their story and communicate with those involved. It also provides the mechanism for families to register, for donors to donate, and for the non-profit organization to thank its sponsors. 

We were glad to donate our efforts for this project.

The Frisco Chamber of Commerce decided to kick off the national Chamber of Commerce week with the unveiling of its new website, which uses our Online Business Partner™ technology.

Chamber President John Land had us develop a custom design for the new website and build the initial menus and pages. Then his staff took over, and added additional pages and created their own material right in the website, thus letting them manage their costs as well as their site content.

Some of the information displayed on the Chamber of Commerce website resides in a different system, and the Chamber did not want to convert all of that information at this time. To allow for a fast and smooth transition, the data in the other system is displayed on the Chamber's new site through "iframes" or windows within a web page that display the content of a different web page.

While this reduces the level of control available for managing the presentation of the data from the other system, it allowed the Chamber to launch their new website without any time or attention whatever paid at this time to the format and management of the date stored on the other system.

Even though the Chamber did not make any announcement to its members, several hundred people per day discovered it on their own, starting with the publication of the site late on October 20th.

(The graphs here are taken from the standard graphs provided to every owner of a site using our Online Business Partner™ technology.)

By the way... the visitors in the first week were not just from Frisco, not just from Texas, and not just from this side of the globe!

It looks like there were visitors from nearly every state in the US, from Mexico and Canada, and quite a few from all over Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia as well.

In fact, with this much global traffic in the first few days, we would not be surprised to see visits from pretty much the rest of the world when we look back after a month or two!

(We know Frisco is a great place. But how do all these other folks know it? And why haven't they already moved here, now that they do?)

The Frisco Bar Association's website includes a list of all its members, as well as a facility for visitors to the website to find members of the Frisco Bar Association who specialize in specific areas of the law.

To allow Bar Association members to keep their information up to date, we developed an option to allow each member to view and edit their own directory information by logging in to the secure "members only" area.