What about Metatags?
..it is hard to get excited about Metatags to be honest, but unfortumately they are pretty important to getting your site recognised by the search engines. Fortunately they are not brain surgery and are fairly easy to implement. You do however need to have a wee bit of knowledge of HTML, the web coding language. So what are they?
They are tags which are read by search engines and used to help determine what your site is all about. The most important of these is the page <title> tag. The contents of the title tag usually appears in the first line of the search engine results as well as appearing in the title bar of the browser. If you look at your web site HTML code for a web page you will see the title tag. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> portions will appear in the bar of someone’s browser when they view the web page. The text you use in the title tag is also one of the most important factors in how a search engine decides to rank your web page. Search engines want to offer relevant results, so those results should prominently reflect the words the searcher is using compared to the title of the web page. The general advice is put your main key words for that page first in the <title> tag, and make the other words (up to 12) reflect the page content. So for example for our whistleblowing page we have put: “Whistleblowing Whistle Blowing Policy – Free HR Employment Policy for download”. (Note we have used both terms “Whistleblowing” and “Whistle Blowing” as search engines will view these differently.
The next tag to worry about is the <description> tag. A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, but a page’s description meta tag should be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. For example the description of our Recruitment page is:
Recruitment and selection template – policies and procedures for small businesses for free download.
The next metatag is the <keyword> tag. I am told that this tag is largely ignored by search engines these days because of abuse. However it is worth packing all your key words for the page in question into this tag – does no harm, and some of the smaller engines still look at this I believe – well we need all the help we can get! So for our recruitment page we have:
recruitment policy, selection, selection techniques, template, sample, employment policies, HR Polices, free, personnel, human resources, staff, small business
Heading Tags
Once these tags are properly sorted, you can turn your attention to the various heading tags. In HTML terms these are the tags which are applied to the headings on your page. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>, the least important. Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document. Search engines also utilise these tags to pick up key words embedded in them. We have therefore tried to place our most important keywords in headings embedded in <h> tags.
And dont forget the Sitemap…
Finally we submitted a sitemap to the main search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. An XML sitemap file is a file which tells the search engines about your site structure and which URLs it should index. You simply create a file, put this in the root directory of your site and tell the search engines it is there.
You can create the file in a number of ways: for example Google provides a tool here. There are also free sites on the internet such as http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/. Also many web hosts will provide a free tool to produce this file and automatically upload this to your site. Once the file is uploaded, go to Google Webmaster tools / site configuration / sitemaps and submit your file. Do the same with Yahoo, Bing and Ask – just go to their sites and follow through their equivalent of Google webmaster tools (nb you will need to prove you own your site – usually by uploading a small file to your site – if you can’t do this you will need to talk to your techie who can do this for you). Obviously when you change your site by adding or deleting pages you need to generate a new file for upload, and again submit to the search engines.
So – Summary of What We Have Done So Far
So there we are – this is the current position of the website:
- We have updated all the content and tried to identify what we think our users would most appreciate (the most important step)
- We have moved our web page to a more reliable hosting company
- We have tried to ensure the structure and navigation within the site is logical and easy to follow (for users and search engines!)
- We have identified relevant keywords and ensured these are referenced throughout the relevant pages (nb you can emphasise this by bolding the first reference to the keyword on the page)
- We have utilised the <title>, <description> and <keyword> metatags to inform the search engines about the site
- We have incorporated the keywords in each page within the heading <h> tags at least once where possible.
- We have submitted our sitemap to the search engines.
Well that is where we are so far except we have also started a blog (well you know that because you are reading this!). In the next post we will look at the results for January 2011 – the first full month following the changes – to see if our efforts so far have had any effect on improving traffic and in particular the monetisation of the site.
Leave a Reply