It can be very frustrating to conduct a search for your website name on the Internet when you have opened the doors on your online business, and you’re ready for the first customers to begin placing their orders. The results of your search show hundreds, thousands, or even millions of listings, and yours is nowhere to be found! The reason you can’t find your site listed there may be that there hasn’t been enough time for the search engines to spider your site to give it a ranking. Usually, however, it is the failure of the website owner to get his site rated on an ongoing basis.
A key factor in positioning your website so it will be ranked appropriately is to begin with search-conscious design of each page. You will need to decide what the keywords for your business are going to be, and then use those words strategically in the hidden header of your pages. This hidden area of your page contains information that tells those search engine spiders about your page. This information is called metadata, and contains metatag descriptions, such as this information from the header of larryvaughn.com:
META name=”Subject” content=”Business Consulting Services”
One of the earliest exercises I have my clients go through is compiling a list of keywords associated with their business and should be analyzed by the search engines. Some times this list may contain hundreds of words and other times only ten or twenty, determined by the type business. After determining the number of topics to be represented by individual pages on the website, the work begins to determine which keywords need to be associated with each of those pages. For example, look at the keyword listing for one of my high-tech recruiting clients, whose keyword list is an entire page long!
You’ll notice as you read through the keyword listing above that there are several slightly different listings for several of the topics. This is because you must make every effort to identify how someone might search for you product(s) or service(s). For example, your family sedan can be referred to as a car, an automobile, a vehicle, etc. A consultant might be referred to as an independent contractor, advisor, counselor or provider, etc. We have a lot of different ways of identifying things, and we must strive to include those descriptions in the metadata.
If you are designing your own website, here’s another key element professional programmers know: make your page titles work for you. The title of each of your site’s pages appears at the top address bar in the browser as it is being viewed. For example when you view the website design page on my website, your address bar will show http://www.larryvaughn.com/designdoc.shtml, and at the top of the page you will see the words “Vaughn Consulting Group eCommerce & Website Design”. That title helps describe the topic of the page and can be used for subliminal promotion of your goods and services. The title of the page should always be descriptive and focused on key business aspects as reflected in your keywords.
For instance, the title for one of my favorite sites, entrepreneur.com is “Entrepreneur.com: Start, Grow, and Manage Your Small Business.” Within the title for Entrepreneur.com, there are five different keywords represented: entrepreneur, start, grow, manage and small business. These keywords also form combinations: start your small business, grow your small business, and manage your small business.
The next step in designing each of your site’s pages is to determine the wording for the meta description, which is the information about your site that is displayed under your name when a search engine includes your site in search results. The site description should be explanatory, it should be no more than 30 words, and it should include as many of the top 10 keywords that will fit. Here’s an example from my home page:
META name=”Description” content=”Business & Human Resources Consulting group specializing in career coaching services, Internet consulting, website development, multimedia design/writing and production to marketing material development, and task training design/administration.
Notice in the example above you’ll see the primary keywords from the title in the description as well as some new keywords such as “multimedia design/writing,” “marketing material development,” “career coaching” and “task training.” Include all primary keywords and derivatives in the keyword metatag, separating each keyword using a comma to establish important keyword phrases. The description now serves to reinforce the title of the page, and gives the site a much better chance of attracting new visitors.
And, just a couple of thoughts on optimizing your web page; the text within the body of your page is very influential in search engine positioning. If your website’s navigation system is consistent with the primary keywords, it will reinforce those keywords when indexed by a search engine. Even the headlines, subheads, links to other documents and the text within paragraphs on your page will influence search engines. Try to keep each of these elements consistent with your primary keywords, and you should get results like the search below for Vaughn Consulting Group
While many people can already write decent copy, they have a problem when it comes to writing great search engine copy. (Two VERY different things!) They either shove far too many keywords in – making the copy sound like a broken record – or they don’t use enough because of fear of sounding foolish. You can get more information on using metadata copy effectively by clicking here.
