Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to the visibility of your website. Optimally, we want to be indexed, get credit for content, and search result placement for our company on the Internet. Since there are so many facets to SEO, this is the first of many articles on the topic that will help you and your wedding vendor company to get the proper attention from the search engines, spiders and web crawlers. It’s easy to check out and verify your page’s “Title” and “description meta tag.” Correcting any deficiency is relatively simple and will only serve you and increase the effectiveness of your page’s content.
If you have the know-how and software (ftp and html editor) you can make the corrections yourself. If not than your web designer or a programmer. The remedies are easy and will provide excellent returns and benefits without spending money or very little if you have to hire someone. lot of money, actually free if you know how to ftp and use an html editor). Following are very simplified explanations about what to do, in layman’s terms and without getting too technical. My desire is to see that each vendor be able to implement these ideas.
Let’s consider the page’s “Title.” All web pages have a Title, but are you using it. The title is easy to find without knowing one bit of coding. Look at the bar / border across the top of your browser. What is the textual content that can be seen in that space? Does it read something generic like “My Home Page.” If so, then you need to have the “Title” of this page changed. This is done via a simple line of code on the server’s version of your web page.
<TITLE>Just Wedding Vendors Network … More than just a list of wedding vendors that span the globe. </TITLE>
Now, let’s look at your “description meta tag” since it is supported by most major search engines. The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a web page’s content. This allows the web page author(s) to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content, as in a “flash” based web site. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can affect click-through rates. The W3C doesn’t specify the size of this description meta tag, but it is thought that search engines use the first 155 characters. The description meta tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. The “Head” section is always near the top of the coding. Although, the order is not important, it is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Your descriptive sentence or two about your web page goes here.”> or
<metaname=”description” content=”Your descriptive sentence about your web page goes here.”>
Let’s look at what your specific description meta tag reads. Using the menu bar at the top of your browser, CLICK “view” then choose “View Source.” A text or notepad document will open on your desktop with all the code that makes that page appear the way it does. Now, don’t get nervous, you’re just looking and can’t change anything by looking at this code. As described above, look for the <Head> tag, now read down and look for the <Title> tag. The description meat tag should be somewhere just below that.
It is important to note that only the search engines (Google, Yahoo, … ) themselves know the algorithm that is used to return results. Each algorithm is proprietary and a well guarded secret. Keep in mind with a click of a few button, any or all of the criteria can be changed. So how do we know what to do? In my opinion, if we were to meticulously study search results while considering all the mitigating factors (metadata, page structure, , I feel it is possible to make an educated conclusion based on observation how to prepare our pages for the best possible SEO and subsequent Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
With that said, unlike a few years ago, it seems Google will default to your Meta description information when you search for a page by URL such as www.example.com. Yahoo does the same, which was also true for them in 2004. But of course, not many people other than the site owners themselves or the site’s developer search using a page’s URL. Google will often default to the Meta description information, even if the searched-upon keywords do not appear within it, which they weren’t doing as much back in 2004. Yahoo will also default to the Meta description info; however, they tend to take just the first part of the Meta description and then add a snippet of text from the visible page copy that happens to have the searched-upon keywords within it.
It seems at this time, Google does not seem to give any weighting to pages when the keyword queried is used only in the Meta description tag and nowhere else. I say “at this time” because I know in the past I have seen them show pages that have the keyword only in the Meta description, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something they turn on and off at various times. We can logically conclude if they show pages that have the phrase only in the Meta description tag then weight is given to the words in the tag. If not, then they are not looking to the Meta Tag Description.
If you decide not to add a Meta description tag, it seems Google appears to display a description that is almost always the start of a sentence that happens to contain the keyword phrase as opposed to a snippet grabbed from the middle of a sentence. This is in comparison to a former Google logic where they would often grab just grab the first instance of the keyword phrase, which may have or may have not made a nice snippet. If the page is listed in DMOZ and lacks both the description and “NoODP” Meta tags, it seems Google will sometimes display the DMOZ description for the page.
In terms of optimizing your pages, “What does all this mean?” It would be reasonable to conclude it’s a worthwhile investment to create a unique and compelling Meta description for each page of your site, being conscious that nothing is a substitute for well-written content that uses keywords and phrases naturally. You will have a good chance of having a decent description show up. Ultimately this will provide you with the most control over what is in the SERPs. Of course, nothing is a substitute for well-written content on that page that uses keywords and phrases naturally. In conclusion, updating your page’s ”Title” and “description meta tag” to reflect you and your business will allow earch engines and web crawlers know more about the page’s content.
If you have not done so already you should add your URL to Google. Also for the wedding vendors that want to do-it-yourself: Download Alleycode HTML Editor (FREE), and Download FileZilla FTP Client (FREE) as you will need them.
Article compiled by Brett Szemple for Just Wedding Vendors Network
posted by Brett Szemple and Josephine Donatelli
