Top Five Tips For Optimising Your Business’ Meta Tags

Anyone who’s been around long enough in the SEO industry will remember how meta tags where used and abused to get short term results for sites all over the world. Of course, search engines cottoned on to these tactics, and over time removed some of the weighting meta tags (especially keyword tags) have in the ranking algorithms. However, well optimised meta tags are still important, and it is worth taking the time to optimise the meta tags for your business to increase your sales, signups, leads- whatever your business aim.

Today meta tags should be used responsibly. By optimising these tags efficiently you may notice an improvement in search engine results pages (SERPs), as well as the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your results in the SERPs.

The following tags are found within the HTML code of your page. By using these tags wisely, you can increase some of the on-page search engine optimisation for your site with very little effort.

Tip #1: Title Tag Optimisation

Although not a meta tag, the title tag is widely considered to be one of the most important parts of on-page optimisation, not to mention being equally important to visitors. The title tag is the text you see in the top left of your browser window – a tag that displays the page title, but the text does not actually appear on your page itself. In the HTML code, your title tag may look something like this:

<title>Web Site Design And Web Development London UK : Datadial Ltd </title>

Title tags are important to visitors- just as a title is important to a book. The title tag can be used to identify your site from another if multiple browser windows are open for example. Obviously the title should be accurate to the content of the specific page. It’s very important that each page on the site has a different title to reflect that specific pages content. Having uniform title tags across all pages is a waste of prime optimisation space.

The title tag is also be used in search engine results. For example, in Google (and many other search engines), the blue links millions of searchers click on everyday, almost without a thought, uses the title tag for the page.

You can see from our example the title tag is being shown as the title of the search result. By creating a well optimised title tag that is compelling to the reader, you will notice an increase in your CTR.

Tip #2: Placing Keywords In Title Tag

By placing your most important keywords in your title tag, your page in the search results has more of a chance of getting that click, as the keyword will be bolded, as you can see in this example:

So a result for the search query ‘free widgets’:

The page with the title tag: “Free Widgets: Download Your Widgets For Free Here Now” should get more clicks to their site over a page with the title tag: “The big title tag that mentions Widgets”.

Why?

Firstly, several key phrases are found in the tag (as opposed to just one of the keywords). This means potentially more of the title is bolded if those search phrases are used, which attracts the searchers attention.

Secondly, the keyword is located closer to the beginning of the tag. Since most searchers read from left to right, the quicker the keyword is seen in the tag, the more likely the user will stop to read the result, and as less text has been read prior to discovering the keyword, your result may appear more relevant.

Thirdly, the tag is exciting, as opposed to the other, which doesn’t inspire the searcher to stop and read the description for the result.

Fourthly, the tag has a call to action, inviting the searcher to click the link.

The main aim of your sites title tag should be to include your main keywords (which will be bolded and attract their attention), then provide them with a compelling title that fulfils their search need. By fulfilling their search need, the searcher will either click the link, or continue reading your listing (by moving on to the results description).

Tip #3: Description Meta Tag Optimisation

The description meta tag is an important part of on-page optimisation. A well optimised description meta tag can have a large impact on your click through rate (CTR) for your site in the search engine results, along with the ability to contain your top keywords.

The description meta tag is intended to contain a brief description of the page’s content. Certain search engines use the description meta tag within their results, therefore it’s a good idea to get your description meta tags right!

The description meta tag in the HTML code may look something like this:

<meta name="Description" content="Datadial offer complete online marketing solutions to meet your targets and fit your budget. Internet marketing services and consultancy that gives results." />

And may appear in search results:

The description meta tag text does not appear in the page text itself. However, when optimising your description meta tag, be sure to keep the description of the page accurate, and to include your main keywords. These keywords will again be bolded in the search results, therefore drawing more attention to your result.

It may also be wise to place a subtle call to action, slogan or mission statement within your description meta tag or a description that will entice the searcher. Remember, you are competing with many other pages so providing searchers with a reason to click on your page is a good idea and can easily be accomplished with the description meta tag.

Note: If you have submitted your site to the DMOZ Open Directory Project, you may find that your description is used from that of the DMOZ description.
To prevent this from happening, and to prompt search engines to use the description meta tag on your page, add the following robots meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp">

This meta tag also works for MSN, as well as Google.

Similar effects can also be found in Yahoo! Results if your page is listed in the Yahoo! Directory by using the following robots meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noydir">

If you would like to use both, you can simply comma separate the ‘content’ for the robots meta tag, like so:

<meta name="robots" content="noydir, noodp">

Tip #4: Robots Meta Tag

In addition to instructing search engine robots to not use DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory descriptions, the robots meta tag can also be used to control which pages can be indexed, followed and archived.

The robots meta tag is also found in the HTML code, and again does not appear on the page. This meta tag is an instruction to search engine robots when crawling a page and can be used to control which pages can be indexed or followed by the search engine spider. The robots meta tag may be similar to this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noodp,noydir">

The ‘content’ part of this meta tag controls the instruction to the search engine robot. The following operators can be included within the content:

• noindex- prevents search engines indexing the page
• nofollow- prevents search engines following links on the page
• none- combines the function of noindex and nofollow into one
• noimageindex- prevents search engines indexing images on the page
• noarchive- prevents search engines caching the page (keeping an archived copy of the page in their results)
• noydir- prevents Yahoo! from displaying the Yahoo! Directory description
• noodp- prevents search engines from displaying the description from the Open Directory
• nosnippet- prevents a description appearing in the SERPS

The robots meta tag is useful for excluding pages you do not wish to be found in search engines (such as member pages), as well as the use previously mentioned.

Tip #5: Keywords Meta Tag Optimisation

The keywords meta tag used to be a powerful SEO tool. By placing keywords in this meta tag, SEOs used to be able to see their pages ranked for these keywords relatively quickly.
Once the search engines realised that it was effectively being abused, all weight that the keywords meta tag had on a page’s results was removed by the majority, effectively making the keywords meta tag relatively redundant.

Now it is not necessary to place keywords in the keyword meta tag- this has little to no effect on the pages ranking in search results. However, placing your keywords in the keyword meta tag can still be found in practice today, as small search engines may still rely on keyword meta tag content.

The keywords meta tag is found in the HTML code and may look similar to this:

<meta name="keywords" content="seo,buying seo,seo guide" />

Keywords are comma separated, and should not be repeated. This was once a tactic spammers used to trick search engines into thinking a page was relevant and today repeating keywords can hurt you rather than helping. You can also include synonyms of your keywords as well, ‘book’ and ‘books’ are not the same.

There are many other meta tags in use today, including abstract, author, copyright, distribution, expires, language, refresh and revisit meta tags, amongst others. While these meta tags can also be used, these tags have little effect on optimising your pages for search results, therefore these meta tags have been excluded.

Summary

By using the meta tag optimisation tips mentioned, you should notice an improvement in search engine results, as well as an increase in the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your results. To make the most out of meta tag optimisation, we suggest testing different title and descriptions to maximise the amount of click throughs your results get, tracking the results over a set period and using the best performing tags to improve your CTR from search engine results pages (SERPs).

You should also be aware that other on-page search engine optimisation efforts should also be used to make your pages search engine friendly and rank higher.

The Definitive Guide To Website Geo-Location In Search Engines

Being based in the UK I find that SEOs on this side of the pond have to get very familiar with website geo-location factors. It’s an unfortunate quirk of search engines that one of the main criteria that search engines use to determine a websites location is the location of its webhost.

If you’re looking to target a specific locality, then it’s vital that your site is recognised by search engines as being from that territory. Local websites are featured more prominently in local versions of the search engines, there are also surfers are given the option to see only pages from their location excluding foreign based sites.

Up until fairly recently UK hosting tended to be fairly expensive in comparison to our US cousins. For this reason many UK based sites found themselves running into problems when they tried to save costs by hosting their sites in the USA.

Don’t take it for granted that by hosting with a UK based company that their servers will also be based in the UK. Many UK hosting companies locate their servers overseas including one very well known host that bases their servers in Germany. I’m sure this is the case the world over. When signing up for hosting contracts, if location is an issue for you, always check that the servers are located geographically where you would expect them to be.

There are several factors that are theorised that effect the location of a site in terms of search engines. This list tends to include,

• The top level domain extension (.co.uk, .fr, .de)
• The location (IP address) of the website host
• The geographic location of the domain registrar
• The language that the site is written in
• The location of incoming links
• On page factors (addresses, telephone numbers)
• Registering with Google Local

Obviously some of these factors hold more importance than others, some I theorise are used marginally, others I believe not at all, or their effect is too minimal to test.

Using The Correct TLD (Top Level Domain)
This is your best case scenario. You have a site that you’re targeting to UK consumers, holding a .co.uk site will pretty much guarantee that you’ll be found in the UK search results, even if you choose to host out of the country. For example the server for whois.co.uk is based in the US, but the site is still returned in the UK only version of a Google search.

Website Host Location
There are of course many instances of websites that are targeted to a specific country but are using a generic top level domain such as a .com or .net. In these cases simply ensuring that your hosts servers are geographically located in your marketplace should ensure that the site is recognised as being local. The Datadial site for example is using a .net TLD, but as its host is located in the UK is still appears for UK only queries. ASP.net which is located in the US does not appear for the equivalent query.

Geographic Location Of The Domain Registrar
I feel this is a factor that is sometimes overlooked by many webmasters, but as Google has access to the geographic location such as the location of the domain registrar it would make sense for them to make use of this as well. This along with other registrar information such as Whois data could well be used as a ‘tie-breaker’ when country-specific TLDs are hosted elsewhere. For example many country specific TLDs such as .fm, .cc, and .tv are now being used because of the brandability of the domain extension. In cases such as these where the TLD extension is indicating one location and the hosting location indicating another then it would be a logical step to make use of the information available from the domain registrar.

Site Language
Obviously as well as it making sense to make sure your site is written in the language of the search visitors that you’re looking for, it may well be one of the factors that a search engine may use to help determine the location of a site. It certainly isn’t a defining factor though as it’s relatively easy to find foreign language sites within the UK only search results.

Location Of Incoming Links
As above, the idea is that a search engine can use the location of incoming links to determine the site location. Again, I’m sceptical if this is any more than of marginal importance. I have seen lots of sites with low quality link profiles that consist of largely overseas located links and of course news sites with very few links seem to have little problem get geographically placed before backlinks have had a chance to develop.

Site Addresses/Telephone Numbers
Again, it’s just good practice to have local contact details for local markets. There is also speculation that this may be used to place a sites location. Again this is difficult to test but I’m doubtful if this is would be anything more than of marginal importance.

Registering With Google Local
Again, hard to test, but it would make sense for Google to make as much use of all the information that was made available to them. Yahoo and MSN also have similar local services.

Going back to our original list I would place the factors in the following order of importance,

1. TLD extension
2. Hosting location
3. Domain registrar
4. Google local registration
5. Incoming links
6. Site language
7. On page addresses/phone numbers

Of course, many of these factors are very difficult to test on their own as it’s difficult to isolate individual factors on their own. Certainly the first three seem to influence the outcome the most.

Site Targeting In Google Webmaster Tools
Last year Google added an option in Webmaster Tools to define a geographic location for a website. Unfortunately this is only an option if you site is already on a non-specific TLD.  Vanessa Fox wrote on SearchEngineland,

If your domain is a location-specific TLD (such as the .fr example above), Google will show you the country that your site is associated with but won’t let you specify something different. However, if your domain is not country specific (such as a .com or .net), you can indicate the location of the site…

You can provide information at a more granular level than country. For example, if your site is for a pizza restaurant in Seattle, you can specify up to the street address (although you can input any granularity that makes sense for your business such as city or state).

One of the most useful things about this tool is that it lets you specify different locations for each subdomain. This can be extremely helpful for large corporates which could save them from having to purchase domains and/or source hosting in many different localities.

Geo-Detection Tool

The SEOMoz Geo-detection tool is is a useful way of checking how well a website is targeted to a specific country or market.

More resources
Get Elastic – Location Targeting In Google
Webmaster Central Blog – Better Geographic Choices For Webmasters
Search Engine Journal – On Site Geotargeting And SEO
Search Engine Land – SEO And SEM Outside The US

SEO Buyers Guide – Free Download

Datadial have launched a revised second edition of their SEO buyers guide. The guide is designed to take the confusion and guesswork out of buying SEO services. One of the main problems facing the SEO industry is that buyers often aren’t clear on exactly what they are buying and why.

The problem arises when less scrupulous companies aim to take advantage of this lack of knowledge, promises are made that can’t be fulfilled, or the required work simply isn’t carried out.In the end it is not just the client that loses out, but also the industry as a whole as confidence is a difficult thing to win back.

Our buyers guide is aimed at taking the guesswork out of choosing your SEO vendor. It details the more common scams, details the work that should be being carried out in any good SEO campaign, and offers a list of key questions that you should be asking your potential SEO.

The key for any buyer is to educate yourself as much as possible about the service that you’re buying, the more you know, the more informed your decision will be.

Download our buyers guide for free

Corporate Blogging – What’s The Point?

Corporate blogs have become far more commonplace over the past few years as companies begin to realise their importance in the marketing mix and how valuable they can be as a communications channel. Some of my favourite business efforts include,

Kodak – I love this effort as it doesn’t focus on cameras, but what it’s target audience is interested in, the photography.

Innocent Drinks – Kind of wacky and crazy, just the kind of thing you would expect from the company really! It does a good job of keeping things interesting and engaging the audience.

Southwest Airlines – A really nice showcase for the company, great design, interesting content and does a good job of passing company news while keeping things light-hearted.

ASOS – A good example of what can be done with an ecommerce site. It does a good job of focusing on products, but also scatters in industry news.

BBC – Obviously the huge manpower at their disposal and being able to tap some the finest journalistic minds gives the BBC an unfair advantage, but their blog network is among one of the best online.

Marriott – A self-confessed technophobe Bill Marriott proves that it’s never too late to start blogging. Not only that but the resulting blog is an extremely useful communications channel.

Waitrose – A great example of what can be achieved when a not so traditional web company takes blogging seriously.

I deliberately left out examples of tech and web based companies to prove that it can be done well for traditionally non-web based companies.

Okay, so what is the point?

Audience engagement – Blogs are a great way of engaging your audience with topics that you wouldn’t normally cover on the main section of your site. You can keep company news and conversation clearly defined from the ‘corporate’ sections of the site while at the same time offering your audience more in-depth information should it be required.

Information gathering – Blogs can be used to gather opinions, get product feedback, collect email addresses and collect RSS feed subscribers. Over time a growing audience is a valuable commodity in itself.

Communications channel – Corporate blogs have been used as an instant communications channel between retailer and customer. Product information, manuals, corrections, notifications and recalls can be made available instantly.

Content creation – An increased number of pages of your site will generally increase the amount of content leads to an increase in the number of search engine visitors. With clearly defined calls to action this should lead to an increase in sales.

Social media – Blog are a great way of opening up the marketing power of social media sites. Visitors can easily submit posts to sites like Digg and Stumbleupon, this directly leads to an increased number of visitors, links and the visibility of your site as a whole. Active blogs generally encourage more incoming links from other sites, so can be a great way of supplementing a link building strategy.

Things to remember….

• Get started using a simple blogging script like Wordpress. It’s pretty much the industry standard, it’s easy to use, and best of all it’s free.
• Keep the blog on your commercial domain. You’ll get little benefit from using a hosted blog or a seperate domain altogether. The idea is to get additional visitors to your commercial site. blog.company.com or company.com/blog is ideal.
• Define a writing policy. Be clear who your audience is and what will interest them. Also be clear on exactly how much information you’re going to make public.
• The writing style is important. Traditionally visitors expect a less corporate and more conversational writing style. The use of humour can work well. Ideally your posts should be short and punchy.
• Avoid over promotion. It’s fine to link to your products and services from within your posts, but visitors won’t come just to read a rehashed product catalogue.
• Keep things fresh. Your blog should be regularly updated, sharing writing amongst your staff is the ideal solution, outsourcing the writing is another, though is no substitute for your staff knowledge and expertise, staff participation should be encouraged.
• What do I write? Traditional topic areas are company news, staff news, product news, industry discussion and thoughts, how to’s and resource lists. Ideally the more diverse the topic areas, the easier you’ll find things to write about and the bigger the potential audience.

Online Marketing after the fall of Lehman Brothers

The recent news of the fall of Lehman Brothers Bank has caused a knock on effect for large and small businesses around the world. More and more companies are assessing their expenditure, including online marketing budgets.

However, the latest report from Netimperative shows that online advertising is proving to be the choice advertising stream for small and large businesses, having a dramatically increased prediction for advertising spend over the next couple of years.

According to the report:

“81% of advertisers claim that their allocated online ad spend has grown in 2008 and predict that it will continue to do so over the next couple of years”

With a predicted increase of 16% in 2009 and 17% for 2010.

Furthermore, “three quarters (73%) state that they are increasing their use of online as an advertising medium whilst 31% of advertisers claim their use of TV is decreasing and 40% cite a decrease in the use of newspapers.”

So What Does This Mean For Your Business?

In this economic climate companies are rightly evaluating where and why they are spending money. However, businesses looking to cut back on their advertising spends should be aware of this report when deciding which advertising streams to cut back on.

The predicted growth of online advertising according to this report is set to be potentially the best, with TV and newspaper advertising decreasing. With the support of these latest statistics, it would be a wise move to increase your online marketing budget, as the growth of your online audience delivers cost effective results.

The timing for increasing your online advertising return on your business is now. With the growth prediction for online advertising for the next two years, increasing your online advertising budget now will help increase brand perception and brand awareness for your business, whilst bringing greater return on your online advertising spend.

Contact Datadial to maximise your online advertising budget today

Google AdWords Keyword Matching Options

You’re probably aware of the quality targeted traffic Google AdWords can bring to your website through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, and if so, you should be aware of the importance of keywords.

Google provides several keyword matching options to enhance the exposure of your ads, which when used correctly, can pre-qualify visitors and maximise your advertising budget.

Google’s keyword matching options include: -

•    Broad Match
•    Phrase Match
•    Exact Match

Broad Match

Broad Match is the default keyword type where the advert runs on relevant variations of your keywords and phrases. This means your ad could display when the search term includes synonyms, singular/plural forms and other phrases containing your keywords.

Google’s example provides an excellent example of how this keyword matching option operates. In their example, if the keyword web hosting is used, the advert would display for the following search queries:

web hosting company
webhost
web site hosting

You can see that related synonyms also trigger the advert to display, along with additional terms within the triggering keyword (such as site in the last example).

As the keyword variations triggering your adverts change over time, Google continually monitors the keyword quality and performance, meaning you continue to display the highest performing and most relevant keyword variations.

Broad match has several advantages: – more visitors can be attracted to your site as your advert is displayed for other keyphrases which you may not have thought about targeting, but are still relative to the keyword you’ve chosen.

The disadvantage to broad match keywords is that unwanted search terms may trigger the ad to display (if not correctly managed using negative keywords, which will be explained later).

Phrase Match

The next keyword matching option is phrase match. Phrase match keywords trigger your advert to be displayed if the search query contains the keyphrase in the order specified, and phrase match keywords are enclosed in quotation marks (“ “). For example, the phrase match keyword “football boots” will display for the search queries such as:

football boots
buy football boots
football boots review

but would not display for search queries such as:

boots for football or football shoes.

Phrase match has the advantage of being more targeted than broad match, but also has the disadvantage of potentially displaying the advert for an unwanted search query if not correctly managed using negative keywords, i.e. for the phrase match keyword “football boots” the advert would also display for the search query free football boots. If your business is selling football boots and your ad displays for this term, you’re unlikely to make a sale from this searcher!

An important note: For phase match keywords, your keyword or keyphrase triggering your ad is not case sensitive to the search query.

Exact Match

The third keyword matching option is exact match. Exact match keywords will only display the advert if the search query is exact to the keyword.
Exact match keywords are enclosed in ‘[‘ and ‘]’ characters.

For example, for the exact match keyword [buy dog bowl], the advert will only display if the search query is buy dog bowl and would not display for any other search query.

Exact match keywords have the advantage of being extremely targeted if you know an exact popular term for your industry.

Negative Keywords

The final and equally important keyword matching option is negative keywords. Negative keywords are used to NOT display the advert if the search query contains the negative term. Negative keywords are used by placing a ‘-‘ character before the keyword.
For example, if your business is selling web templates, using the negative keyword
–free will not display your advert if the search query as free web templates.

Reputation Monitoring On The Cheap

Reputation management is going to be a massive growth area for brands over the next few years. Imagine the power in being able to monitor, track and aggregate everything that people are saying about your company and brand online, on blogs, websites, forums, everywhere in fact that your potential clients can find it. With more and more people researching potential purchases online it won’t just be useful to monitor online sentiment, it’ll become vital.

There are several free tools online that will help you to dip your toe into the world of reputation monitoring.

Google Alerts
This is something everyone should have setup. Google alerts will notify you by email every time they find a mention of a specific keyword anywhere online. By setting alerts for keywords like your company name, brand/product names, key staff etc you can keep track of when and why you’re getting mentions online. Key queries include [domain name], [domainname], [domainname.com], [your name], [Brand Name], [yourname], etc.

Google Blog Search
Play with the date parameters to see what people have been saying about your company in the past few days

Twing
Lets you find out what people have been saying about you on forums and discussion boards. Many companies keep a close eye on this and react to positive/negative comments.

Twitter Search
While Twitter is still quite new to a lot of people, it has a huge user base, and many larger tech and media companies are already using it to connect with their audience. Using Twitter Search you can monitor mentions of your company. Subscribe to the RSS feed to be alerted with new brand mentions.