CreationIS – Internet Services

Well I am back and it is good to be back. I’m sure you may have been wondering where I have been and what I have been up to – however, that may have to wait until another blog. Today, I am excited about getting back to the meat and potatoes of “getting googled”.

In my first blog: “Getting Googled” I briefly touched on that fact that if you want to get googled than the best place to find out how to do that is Google itself. Google publishes “Design and Content Guidelines” for those who want to take the time to actually read them. And I mentioned that the first thing written in those guidelines is: “Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.”

My second blog: “Getting Googled – part 2” talked about the concept of Google’s sandbox and persevering for the longer haul. If you have never heard of Google’s (to some so-called) sandbox – I suggest you read it.

At the end I promised meat and potatoes (not to be confused with mead and chips and old English recipe) – “meat of “getting Google”. Actual, physical things you can do to your web site that make them search engine friendly and especially, Google friendly. ”

Google (as defined in “getting googled – part 2) wants you to be successful. And (contrary to some peoples belief), Google wants you to do well in their search engines. It is my personal belief that if you work at it continually – not necessarily constantly, regularly – you will do well in Google. Why? Because most people don’t work the Internet properly. Google even tells you what they want – why don’t more people take advantage of their guidelines? I don’t know. What I do know is that if you work through the guideline techniques you will see results. Not overnight – but clear and definite results.

As a business that offers Internet Marketing Services and search engine optimization services for its clients I study web site designs and source code. So if I happen to click on your web site I may just look at how you have layered your source code – checked out your CSS styles, any extra programming.

I look at two types of sites: the popular sites and the not so popular sites. I don’t know about you but I am probably one of the few people who will click on page 120 in Google and look at the web sites that are showing up way back there. Sometimes its fun – most of the times it is a shocker. The one advantage is if you start at the end of the search query you may find some very good sites that haven’t been discovered by the rest of the world. And remember, every website starts out there.

Anyway, I think I am digressing. Your web site designer when building your new web site should be creating it in such a way that the first three elements of Google’s criteria are built in to the html, php or whatever programming language they are using.

The first three elements are your “title”, “description”, and your “keyword” tags.

<title>Place Title of this web page</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”20 word description of this web page” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”5 – 8 relevant keywords for this page” />

It is very important that you use each page of your web site as a marketing tool. One generic description place on all of your web pages is not going to help you rank better in any search engine. Each page is unique and has unique information – you must treat it as such.

If you are a custom wedding dress designer and the name of your business is something like:

“Custom Designs and Fashions” you would NOT want to have your metatags look like this:

<title>Custom Designs and Fashions for that special day</title>: Eight words that have NO VALUE or RELEVANCY to your actual business. So when people are using Google or Yahoo or any other search engine and they type in: “custom wedding dresses” or “wedding dress designers” your web site will always get passed over and never improve in rankings. If you follow up your description and key words that look like the following it will be a wonder if you ever get ranked.

<meta name=”description” content=”Custom Designs & Fashions: We are a one-stop, custom design store specializing in bridal fashions & custom wedding gowns” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”custom designs, bridal fashions, wedding gowns, custom wedding gowns, brides, gowns, weddings, las vegas” />

Let’s analyze the description. Here is where most people make a big mistake. They like to put the name of the business first in the description of their metatags if they even put anything in this section. Custom Designs & Fashions is great for a business name however, they are four words that do not help you in what you do. And you want to keep in mind that the way people look for things is by what they want not who you are. In fact – there are 18 words in the above description and only three of them are relevant. It is also relevant to the order in which those words are written.

Here is a better example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Custom Wedding Dresses and Gowns to make that special day unforgettable. Custom Designs & Fashions” />

Put your business name last (if you need to) and your key words describing your main service first.

Next look at your keyword tag.”custom designs” – tells me nothing. Custom designed cars, web sites, shoes, hats… it could be anything. So the words are irrelevant. You have to keep in mind that sometimes you have to speak computer not human. All the niceties and cutsie phrases that people so often use are useless to a computer and utterly wasted. Be specific. “custom wedding gowns” or “custom bridal gowns”. Make that your first keyword phrase as the main one. Pick maybe one or two more and that’s it. Like: “wedding gowns” and if you only cater to people in a particular city it is good to put in the city name: “las vegas” or “new york”. No more than that. If you start inundating your keyword section with ever word you can think of you can be stamped as keyword spamming and that will also cost you valuable placement rankings. And always use the most important keyword for that particular phrase first. It gives it greater weight or relevancy.

A good keword metatag would look like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”custom wedding gowns, vegas” />

These are things that search engines look at – Google, Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, Ask, and more… Before any other major SEO – search engine optimization work is done – you have to have these three.

Title – (no more than 6-10 words – I prefer no more than eight) this is what is at the top of the browser.

Description – (no more than 20 words) this is the description tag that most of the search engines use when they pull up a search result. Make it succinct, informative, and compelling. This is you shot to impress someone to click on your link to even go to your web page. Why not more than twenty words? Because if you use more it will more than likely be cut off by the search engine anyway – for limited space reasons. Google cuts off at 21.

Keywords: (6-8 is enough) – most people don’t realize that the more keywords you have in one page the more it waters down its weight or value to the search engine. And you can get in trouble for keyword spamming now. Not like in the beginning day of Internet when everyone was using thousands of keywords. It has not benefit – it can hurt your ranking – don’t do it.

I hope that this entry has been helpful to you – I would love to hear from you and how you may have benefited from the information here. Also, as Internet Marketing Services providers we are always wanting to listen you what people have discovered through their experience – like open source software – open source information.