How to optimise your website Metatags

We're often asked the question “how can I get my website nearer to the top of Google?”, so in this article we'll try to give you some guidance on the steps you should be taking to lift the ranking and visibility of your website on Search Engines.

First however, there are a number of questions you need to ask yourself:-
 1./ What are the benefits you expect to gain by being on the first page
 2./ What search phrases do you need that level of visibility for (be specific and selective)
 3./ What geographic reach that you need (local, regional, national, or global)
 4./ How much is this worth to you, and how much are you willing to spend to achieve this

There are lots of people out there that punt “Search Optimisation” packages. Some are sold as "black magic" (and these ones are usually a complete rip-off), but most simply focus on building meta-tags into the website, adding key words and phrases into the content, and building links to the site, but this is actually only part of the answer, and rather simplifies the problem.  One hint here, is that if you are considering paying someone for SEO services, get them to explain to you what is wrong with your site, and make sure that they tell you exactly what work they will be doing to improve it.  If they are not open and forthcoming with this information, go elsewhere, as this is a sure sign that you will pay money for smoke & mirrors, and not a lot else!

Also, depending on your type of business and your reason for wanting to attract visitors to your website, you may find that other means of marketing your website provide a better return-on-investment than organic SEO services. It may be that banner or directory advertising, or PPC (pay per click) advertising will actually produce better results, but it is often a mix of marketing tactics that ultimately get your website working to its optimum. If you are thinking about SEO, give Immediasite a call first, and we'll happily advise and guide you on this.

Right, let's now take a look at some of the most simple and effective things that YOU can do to get your website more visible on Google's Organic Search results.  Meta-tags and keyword content.

There are a number of different Meta-tags available for use in websites, but we'll just deal with the 3 most obvious and easily understandable ones here.

1./ Title Tags
The Title Tag is the text that you see in the blue bar at the top of your browser window. It is one of the key pieces of information that you can use to tell Google what each page of your website is about.  So if for instance you are an HR company, and this particular website page is about how to deal with racial discrimination, the the Title Tag should read something like "Racial Discrimination", "Dealing with Racial Discrimination", or “How to deal with racial discrimination”.  If you are locally focussed (so for instance a garage in Oxford looking to optimise your MOT page), use the town/city/county name, so something like "Oxford MOT Centre" or "MOT Centre Oxford".  Don't put your company/website name into the Title Tag, as you will see that this appears automatically next to the Tag in the blue bar.

2./ Keyword Tags
This is not visible to the website users, but is a way of telling the Search Engines the words and phrases that you would like your website to be found against, when people do searches.  These words and phrases should be separated by a comma, and should be relevant to that page. As an example for the MOT Centre in Oxford, it might be something like:- Oxford MOT,MOT Oxford,MOT Centre Oxford,Oxford MOT Centre,MOT Test Oxford,Oxford MOT Test, etc.

3./ Description Tag
This allows you to describe the subject of the page. This often appears on the Google results as the description text for the page, and hence needs to read as a proper sentence.  You should make sure that you include the key page name and any key words in the description if possible. So an Example as above would read something like:- "We are an MOT Centre based on Oxford and provide MOT Tests by appointment or while you wait."  Keep the number of characters in this tag down to a maximum of 145 characters, so that the entire tag can be displayed in the results (and try to put your phone number in the tag is possible).

4./ Content keyword density
All of the above items are ways that YOU can tell Google what your page is about. Google will then read the page content to qualify this. For best results, you should aim to get the key words and phrases within the text a few times each, but don't over-do it though, as Google can actually down-grade the page if it thinks that the content is artificially forced. General accepted wisdom says that keywords should constitute somewhere between 7% and 12% of the total text.

The great news for all existing Immediasite customers is that within our 3DCMS Control Panel, you can access and update all of this information (Meta-Tags are found under the “Page Info” tab).

If your website is not currently with Immediasite, and you would like to be able to have the ability to edit, update, and optimise your own website, give us a call and we can explain to you how we can implant our 3DCMS facility behind any existing website, to instantly provide these facilities.