Promote Your Blog! Promote Your Site! v.1.1: Using Meta tags Effectively
[This is a complete re-write of the Promote Your Site! Promote Your Blog! post that I published last week. I've removed the other post, re-done it to add additional information and increased clarity. So, if you've already read the other one, it is worth reading this new version as well.]
Your ability to successfully promote your site, and drive traffic to it, is what will determine its commercial viability (ie. its potential to make you money). All of the strategies for developing revenue streams online -- Affiliate programs, selling e-products or traditional ones, using Google AdSense, etc.. -- depend on bringing traffic to your website (or blog). Your income potential will be determined by the number of visitors to your site. Of course, your content and the quality of your products are important factors too, and will encourage return visits and word of mouth referrals, but without successful site promotion, the other aspects of your site will never have a chance to shine.
There are two approaches when undertaking the task of increasing traffic to your site. The first is external site promotion. This involves submitting your site to search engines and directories, reciprocal linking with sites of similar content, getting exposure in forums, writing useful articles for online articles databases, and many other things. The other approach is internal and primarily involves optimizing your site content and structure to make it search engine friendly.
These two aspects to developing high traffic go hand in hand, and I'll be talking about both in future entries to this blog, and I think they need to be your primary concern before exploring the actual income opportunities you'll be employing to making money. Once you know how to build adequate traffic to your site, then you can concentrate on income generating initiatives like AdSense and affiliate programs. But I think too often people build a website or start a blog, and immediately sign up for AdSense and every affiliate program on the net, and then sit back and wonder why they are not making any money. No way of making money online is going to be successful for you until you learn to drive traffic to your website.
Click to Read the rest of this article...
...I might appear a bit of a hypocrite here because I do have AdSense set up on my site, but I've only done that out of curiosity. I'm spending most of my efforts right now in learning how to develop traffic to my site and waiting to invest my time in understanding actual online revenue streams I start to really see a high number of visitors regularly visiting my site.
There are many ways of promoting your site, and you cannot be truly effective unless you utilize all of them. Some of these strategies are fairly simple and some incredibly complex. We'll start with the fairly simple and move to the more complex from there. Well, let's get started then!
A Quick Word on Keywords: At its most basic, Keywords are those terms which people use in search engines to find the websites that contain information they are looking for. Search engines use these terms as the basis for identifying sites which most closely match what the person is seeking. We, as internet marketers, try to develop our sites in a way that the search engines determine we fit that match. There is an entire science behind determining which Keywords are most effective in achieving high search rankings. It goes beyond simply knowing what terms a user will be searching on.
Later we'll analyze the science behind finding just the right Keywords to encourage high relevancy rankings. And likely you will need to review your site and tweak its content based on this new understanding. But don't worry too much about that for now. When I encourage you to keep keywords in mind in the following discussion of Meta tags, just do your best to think of the terms that logically seem to be important keywords for your target readership. I think a discussion of Keyword selection will make more sense later on if we have a solid understanding of the structure in which they need to be used. That is why I'm starting with their application and not with the science of their selection.
So, let's get started with one of the easiest ways you can modify your site or blog to make it search engine-friendly.
META TAGS: The term "Meta" is derived from the word "Metadata" which means data which describes in summary form a larger collection of data. There are two types of Meta tags: user defined variables and system variables. System variable meta tags are also called "HTTP-EQUIV" tags, because they issue browser level commands such as when to refresh a page, but are rarely used today, as most of their functionality has been replaced by javascript. We will be looking at three user variable Meta tags which, although not as important as they once were, still retain some value to the internet marketer.
The proper syntax for these tags is <META name="[tag name]" content="[values]">, and are found in the header of an HTML page between the <head> and </head> tags.
Of the dozen or more Meta tags built into standard HTML, only three really have any value for web designers in regard to search engines or end users. These are the Title, Description, and Keywords Meta tags. If you open up your website's HTML source code, or click on the Template tab in your blog, you'll see them as something like this:
In the early days of the internet, search engines relied heavily on the values in these tags to help them index and classify web pages. But internet marketers soon learned how to manipulate the data in these tags to achieve unfair search rankings, or falsely represent the content of their sites. In consequence, most search engines today pay little or no attention to these tags, and rely instead on the actual content of a website to determine relevancy for search engine rankings.
So, if these tags have little importance to modern search engines, why am I discussing them as related to promoting your site? Well, these tags are still used in limited fashion by many search engines and can help you in subtle ways, and have other uses which make them worth setting up properly.
For example, Meta tags played a significant part in the logic of the Inktomi search technology, which is what Yahoo!'s search technology is based on, and the search engine Teoma (now known as ExpertRank) used by Ask.com. And while Meta tags may have little impact with other major search engines, many of the less popular and sophisticated search engines still rely on them, meaning that there will be times where effective use of these tags can give you an advantage over another site which has ignored them.
These Meta tags have other subtle effects, as well, which I'll explain in more detail as we look at each individual tags below.
TITLE META TAG: The Title Meta tag has several important uses that you should be aware of. This tag determines what is displayed in a browser's title bar for the active page, and is used as the default name for a page when it is bookmarked. But most importantly, search engines often use the information in this tag as the hyperlink text displayed on their results page.
For this reason, you should make sure that your Title tag accurately represents your site's content. Try to use the most descriptive words in the first 20 or so characters as the rest is usually cut-off when a search engine displays it. And of course, use relevant Keywords as much as possible, because even though most search engines don't give much importance to these tags today, often the values contained in them are still scanned as a part of your site's content as a whole. So including Keywords in your Title tag can add to your site's overall Keyword density.
DESCRIPTION META TAG: The Description Meta tag has a similar application to the Title Meta tag in that many search engines pull from it for their search results, displaying it as the description under a site's hyperlink on results pages. This application is not universal, as Google frequently creates its own description dynamically from the content of your site. Yahoo! utilizes it more frequently, but not in all cases. However, it is better to have it than not, because it at least gives you some small control over how your site is described. And if you leave it empty, some search engines will use the first few words to appear on your site for this description instead, and often that doesn't result in a very good indication of your site's content.
As with the Title tag, use Keywords when creating your Description Meta tag, as some search engines still include its content as a part of the overall evaluation of your site. Also, because this tag is often used as the default description for your site, take your time in what it should contain. Try to write a description which is going to encourage users to click on your link. Include enough so it is clear what your site is about, and include a "call to action" to encourage someone to click on your link. Think of it as your first opportunity to "sell your site". Do not expect a search engine to use more than the first 150 characters though, so be sure to include the important information and your call to action at the very beginning of your description, where it is most likely to be displayed in the search results.
KEYWORDS META TAG: Ah, now we come to the tag that everyone seems obsessed with: the Keywords Meta tag. This is where, in the past, search engines would look to classify and index your site. But today it is used little in search engine algorithms.
However, the Keywords Meta tag hasn't completely lost its usefulness. Some search engines still consider the data in this tag when evaluating a web page, although it is difficult to determine how much weight they give it. However, even Yahoo advises the use of the Keywords Meta tag:
"Use a 'keyword' meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page." -- Yahoo!
And there's other uses for this tag that you should consider. Internal site searches (where the search only looks through the current domain) often use these tags to find individual pages within a website, although this isn't such a concern for bloggers since separate posts don't possess their own Meta tags. In some cases, a search engine that wouldn't use this tag normally, might fall back on it if the page it is evaluating doesn't have enough content to classify. Also, the Keywords Meta tag can sometimes be helpful in getting your page located if a search term is misspelled by the user. So it can be a good idea to include common misspellings or unusual variations of your critical search terms in your Keywords tag. In other cases, it can be useful to list keywords in the Meta tags of individual pages if there are terms that relate to your site as a whole but are not actually used on the current page. For example, if you have a site dedicated to dogs, and one page is dedicated to proper canine diet, but you want people searching for "dog hygiene" to find it as well, you could include "dog hygiene" as part of your Keywords Meta tag.
There is one final way this Meta tag can be useful. As you develop the content for your site, it goes without saying that you should keep critical keywords in mind. Maintaining high keyword density within your content is arguably the most effective way to increase your rankings with search engines. Therefore, I would recommend that before you attempt to create the content for your site, you identify those keywords which are most essential to your topic. Then list those terms in the Keywords Meta tag. This Meta tag then is a constant reminder of which terms you should try to use as you create your content.
In conclusion, let me leave you with a few tips for using the Keywords Meta tag:
In the next edition of Promote Your Site! Promote Your Blog!, I am planning on discussing search engine and directory submission, as well as Link Exchange services, and some other easy ways of driving traffic to your site or blog. If there are specific things you'd like to know about these topics, or if there is another area of site promotion you'd like to know more about, please leave me a comment or send me an email. Part of the purpose of this blog is to present information that is most relevant to you finding online success. I'm doing the research anyway, so let me know which information you're most interested in.
Have a comment or suggestion about this article? Think I got it wrong or did I forget something important? Let me know!
--e
Your ability to successfully promote your site, and drive traffic to it, is what will determine its commercial viability (ie. its potential to make you money). All of the strategies for developing revenue streams online -- Affiliate programs, selling e-products or traditional ones, using Google AdSense, etc.. -- depend on bringing traffic to your website (or blog). Your income potential will be determined by the number of visitors to your site. Of course, your content and the quality of your products are important factors too, and will encourage return visits and word of mouth referrals, but without successful site promotion, the other aspects of your site will never have a chance to shine.
There are two approaches when undertaking the task of increasing traffic to your site. The first is external site promotion. This involves submitting your site to search engines and directories, reciprocal linking with sites of similar content, getting exposure in forums, writing useful articles for online articles databases, and many other things. The other approach is internal and primarily involves optimizing your site content and structure to make it search engine friendly.
These two aspects to developing high traffic go hand in hand, and I'll be talking about both in future entries to this blog, and I think they need to be your primary concern before exploring the actual income opportunities you'll be employing to making money. Once you know how to build adequate traffic to your site, then you can concentrate on income generating initiatives like AdSense and affiliate programs. But I think too often people build a website or start a blog, and immediately sign up for AdSense and every affiliate program on the net, and then sit back and wonder why they are not making any money. No way of making money online is going to be successful for you until you learn to drive traffic to your website.
Click to Read the rest of this article...
...I might appear a bit of a hypocrite here because I do have AdSense set up on my site, but I've only done that out of curiosity. I'm spending most of my efforts right now in learning how to develop traffic to my site and waiting to invest my time in understanding actual online revenue streams I start to really see a high number of visitors regularly visiting my site.
There are many ways of promoting your site, and you cannot be truly effective unless you utilize all of them. Some of these strategies are fairly simple and some incredibly complex. We'll start with the fairly simple and move to the more complex from there. Well, let's get started then!
A Quick Word on Keywords: At its most basic, Keywords are those terms which people use in search engines to find the websites that contain information they are looking for. Search engines use these terms as the basis for identifying sites which most closely match what the person is seeking. We, as internet marketers, try to develop our sites in a way that the search engines determine we fit that match. There is an entire science behind determining which Keywords are most effective in achieving high search rankings. It goes beyond simply knowing what terms a user will be searching on.
Later we'll analyze the science behind finding just the right Keywords to encourage high relevancy rankings. And likely you will need to review your site and tweak its content based on this new understanding. But don't worry too much about that for now. When I encourage you to keep keywords in mind in the following discussion of Meta tags, just do your best to think of the terms that logically seem to be important keywords for your target readership. I think a discussion of Keyword selection will make more sense later on if we have a solid understanding of the structure in which they need to be used. That is why I'm starting with their application and not with the science of their selection.
So, let's get started with one of the easiest ways you can modify your site or blog to make it search engine-friendly.
META TAGS: The term "Meta" is derived from the word "Metadata" which means data which describes in summary form a larger collection of data. There are two types of Meta tags: user defined variables and system variables. System variable meta tags are also called "HTTP-EQUIV" tags, because they issue browser level commands such as when to refresh a page, but are rarely used today, as most of their functionality has been replaced by javascript. We will be looking at three user variable Meta tags which, although not as important as they once were, still retain some value to the internet marketer.
The proper syntax for these tags is <META name="[tag name]" content="[values]">, and are found in the header of an HTML page between the <head> and </head> tags.
Of the dozen or more Meta tags built into standard HTML, only three really have any value for web designers in regard to search engines or end users. These are the Title, Description, and Keywords Meta tags. If you open up your website's HTML source code, or click on the Template tab in your blog, you'll see them as something like this:
<title>A short, to the point, description of your site</title>
<meta name="description" content="A short descriptive phrase about your site along with a strong call to action."/>
<meta name="Keywords" content="Should include the key search words and phrases that relate to your site's content"/>
In the early days of the internet, search engines relied heavily on the values in these tags to help them index and classify web pages. But internet marketers soon learned how to manipulate the data in these tags to achieve unfair search rankings, or falsely represent the content of their sites. In consequence, most search engines today pay little or no attention to these tags, and rely instead on the actual content of a website to determine relevancy for search engine rankings.
So, if these tags have little importance to modern search engines, why am I discussing them as related to promoting your site? Well, these tags are still used in limited fashion by many search engines and can help you in subtle ways, and have other uses which make them worth setting up properly.
For example, Meta tags played a significant part in the logic of the Inktomi search technology, which is what Yahoo!'s search technology is based on, and the search engine Teoma (now known as ExpertRank) used by Ask.com. And while Meta tags may have little impact with other major search engines, many of the less popular and sophisticated search engines still rely on them, meaning that there will be times where effective use of these tags can give you an advantage over another site which has ignored them.
These Meta tags have other subtle effects, as well, which I'll explain in more detail as we look at each individual tags below.
TITLE META TAG: The Title Meta tag has several important uses that you should be aware of. This tag determines what is displayed in a browser's title bar for the active page, and is used as the default name for a page when it is bookmarked. But most importantly, search engines often use the information in this tag as the hyperlink text displayed on their results page.
For this reason, you should make sure that your Title tag accurately represents your site's content. Try to use the most descriptive words in the first 20 or so characters as the rest is usually cut-off when a search engine displays it. And of course, use relevant Keywords as much as possible, because even though most search engines don't give much importance to these tags today, often the values contained in them are still scanned as a part of your site's content as a whole. So including Keywords in your Title tag can add to your site's overall Keyword density.
DESCRIPTION META TAG: The Description Meta tag has a similar application to the Title Meta tag in that many search engines pull from it for their search results, displaying it as the description under a site's hyperlink on results pages. This application is not universal, as Google frequently creates its own description dynamically from the content of your site. Yahoo! utilizes it more frequently, but not in all cases. However, it is better to have it than not, because it at least gives you some small control over how your site is described. And if you leave it empty, some search engines will use the first few words to appear on your site for this description instead, and often that doesn't result in a very good indication of your site's content.
As with the Title tag, use Keywords when creating your Description Meta tag, as some search engines still include its content as a part of the overall evaluation of your site. Also, because this tag is often used as the default description for your site, take your time in what it should contain. Try to write a description which is going to encourage users to click on your link. Include enough so it is clear what your site is about, and include a "call to action" to encourage someone to click on your link. Think of it as your first opportunity to "sell your site". Do not expect a search engine to use more than the first 150 characters though, so be sure to include the important information and your call to action at the very beginning of your description, where it is most likely to be displayed in the search results.
KEYWORDS META TAG: Ah, now we come to the tag that everyone seems obsessed with: the Keywords Meta tag. This is where, in the past, search engines would look to classify and index your site. But today it is used little in search engine algorithms.
However, the Keywords Meta tag hasn't completely lost its usefulness. Some search engines still consider the data in this tag when evaluating a web page, although it is difficult to determine how much weight they give it. However, even Yahoo advises the use of the Keywords Meta tag:
"Use a 'keyword' meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page." -- Yahoo!
And there's other uses for this tag that you should consider. Internal site searches (where the search only looks through the current domain) often use these tags to find individual pages within a website, although this isn't such a concern for bloggers since separate posts don't possess their own Meta tags. In some cases, a search engine that wouldn't use this tag normally, might fall back on it if the page it is evaluating doesn't have enough content to classify. Also, the Keywords Meta tag can sometimes be helpful in getting your page located if a search term is misspelled by the user. So it can be a good idea to include common misspellings or unusual variations of your critical search terms in your Keywords tag. In other cases, it can be useful to list keywords in the Meta tags of individual pages if there are terms that relate to your site as a whole but are not actually used on the current page. For example, if you have a site dedicated to dogs, and one page is dedicated to proper canine diet, but you want people searching for "dog hygiene" to find it as well, you could include "dog hygiene" as part of your Keywords Meta tag.
There is one final way this Meta tag can be useful. As you develop the content for your site, it goes without saying that you should keep critical keywords in mind. Maintaining high keyword density within your content is arguably the most effective way to increase your rankings with search engines. Therefore, I would recommend that before you attempt to create the content for your site, you identify those keywords which are most essential to your topic. Then list those terms in the Keywords Meta tag. This Meta tag then is a constant reminder of which terms you should try to use as you create your content.
In conclusion, let me leave you with a few tips for using the Keywords Meta tag:
- Keep your number of Keywords to under 1,000 characters
- Do not repeat any particular keyword more than 3 times
- Include misspellings or variations of keywords that relate to your site as a whole but might not be mentioned on that page
- Refer back to the keywords you have chosen as you build the content for your web page
* * *
In the next edition of Promote Your Site! Promote Your Blog!, I am planning on discussing search engine and directory submission, as well as Link Exchange services, and some other easy ways of driving traffic to your site or blog. If there are specific things you'd like to know about these topics, or if there is another area of site promotion you'd like to know more about, please leave me a comment or send me an email. Part of the purpose of this blog is to present information that is most relevant to you finding online success. I'm doing the research anyway, so let me know which information you're most interested in.
Have a comment or suggestion about this article? Think I got it wrong or did I forget something important? Let me know!
--e
posted by mywebmistakes at 3:40:00 PM *PERMALINK*
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