This post is mainly aimed at small to medium businesses that are just starting out and are keen to get something going, or have just gone live. I can't tell you how many times I have taught people over the past few years just a handful of strategically important things. So...here goes again, this time in a way that I can now simply refer to. As for my credibility - I would rather not divulge that here, read my Web Site Optimisation Rules and you decide. They are, after all, common sense, and common knowledge....like most things I blog about!
My number 10 rule: Create a web site/shortcut icon
This is one of the simplest and most overlooked goodies in a web site's "bag of tricks"!
Ever wonder why some web sites have a little icon in the address bar? For instance the little white-on-orange background "B" in the address bar right now? It is because they have created a "favicon.ico" in the root of their web directory. Not only is it displayed by the browser in the address bar when your visitor visits, but if the visitor bookmarks it, it is displayed in the bookmark view as well - which makes your site stand out from all the others without favicon.ico's! (and vice-versa, makes your site stand out stand out negatively, if all the others do)
The favicon.ico's that I have created were all based on the old specification of 16x16 pixels in the icon format. These days it is possible to use bigger images, with different formats, but I am still preferring the older specification as it is a very small overhead for your visitor and whatever old browser they may be using 5 years from now. Read more on wikipedia's Favicon entry!
Reasoning:
1. This is more a marketing and branding tool/optimisation than a search engine optimisation. It is extremely subtle in the world of too many messages and by using it, you have an opportunity to reinforce your company/site's brand in the visitor's mind - a very good thing. In the world of marketing, brand awareness is key - no one is going to buy "you" if they don't even "know you" - so first seek to build awareness, then start your "trust campaign".
2. It looks professional and is becoming expected these days
3. And a reminder waiting for each bookmarker is a great place to be
And that is my Rule 10. I will be uploading the others as time allows!
Monday 25 August 2008
Saturday 23 August 2008
Basics of Web Site Optimisation - Rule 9
This post is mainly aimed at small to medium businesses that are just starting out and are keen to get something going, or have just gone live. I can't tell you how many times I have taught people over the past few years just a handful of strategically important things. So...here goes again, this time in a way that I can now simply refer to. As for my credibility - I would rather not divulge that here, read my Web Site Optimisation Rules and you decide. They are, after all, common sense, and common knowledge....like most things I blog about!
My number 9 rule: Use these 9 Meta Tags
These are probably "over kill" as far as Meta Tag usage is concerned, but I prefer this approach to lesser, until I learn something concrete that differs from my experience which has seen some rapid and sustained visitor rate growth where I applied them.
Place Meta Tags in all of your page header sections. There are smart tools for generating the content-related ones, but it is better if they fit into your whole marketing and supporting web site design approach, making them very manageable in a manual way on static web sites. On dynamic, use a clever algorithm to assist you in carefully crafted statements.
Make sure the web page content, including words, links, image names - everything where you can specify text, all aligns with the Keywords, Description and Abstract Meta Tags!
<META name="Keywords" content="[5 comma separated keywords that are present at least twice or more on the page!]">
<META name="Description" content="[enter a short statement containing as many of the keywords as possible]">
<META name="Date" content="[last update date]">
- NOT STRICTLY meta tag legitimate or required but I use it to track the date I last made a change to the page - and use this date to facilitate track which page version search engines have in their cache
<META name="abstract" content="[enter a short statement containing as many of the keywords as possible, possibly reusing the Description meta tag]">
<META name="revisit-after" content="[a number that is tuned to the amount of maintenance you do on the site - initially I use 7 because I perform so much tuning and generally I roll out content in a staged approach to ensure high quality and maintain control over the site's visitor growth] days">
<META name="rating" content="general">
- there are a number of options here for instance "adult", but I only use general
<META name="next" content="[choose or use your site metrics to research the next web page from your site that most visitors normally go to]">
- some web browsers (Firefox) will pre-cache the html page you specify here, making the user experience of your web site seem quicker, if they actually follow your "directions". Very difficult to get right without careful web site design, and if wrong actually wastes your visitors' bandwidth and makes their internet experience slower unnecessarily.
<META name="robots" content="index,follow">
- instruct search engines to index this web page, and follow all links on the page
- in the old days of restricted bandwidth, and depending on what I was marketing on the site, I would instruct the search engine to "noindex"
<META content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
- very important to clarify to the web browsers what the page content is, and which character set is intended otherwise some foreign visitors could end up with strange symbols unintentionally, making your web site difficult to use
Reasoning:
1. By using Meta Tags at all the search engines will rank you higher
2. By using the correctly completed Meta Tags, the search engines will rank you even higher
3. They should repeat your key messages you are trying to convey to your visitors - they serve as a check point for detecting if your message is clear and the page is correctly aligned to achieve maximum impact at the search engines AND visitors
4. Search engine spiders, web crawling bots, web caching servers and even web site blocker software use the tags in their "decision" software to decide whether to analyse, cache, or allow the page to be displayed.
And that is my Rule 9. I will be uploading the others as time allows!
My number 9 rule: Use these 9 Meta Tags
These are probably "over kill" as far as Meta Tag usage is concerned, but I prefer this approach to lesser, until I learn something concrete that differs from my experience which has seen some rapid and sustained visitor rate growth where I applied them.
Place Meta Tags in all of your page header sections. There are smart tools for generating the content-related ones, but it is better if they fit into your whole marketing and supporting web site design approach, making them very manageable in a manual way on static web sites. On dynamic, use a clever algorithm to assist you in carefully crafted statements.
Make sure the web page content, including words, links, image names - everything where you can specify text, all aligns with the Keywords, Description and Abstract Meta Tags!
<META name="Keywords" content="[5 comma separated keywords that are present at least twice or more on the page!]">
<META name="Description" content="[enter a short statement containing as many of the keywords as possible]">
<META name="Date" content="[last update date]">
- NOT STRICTLY meta tag legitimate or required but I use it to track the date I last made a change to the page - and use this date to facilitate track which page version search engines have in their cache
<META name="abstract" content="[enter a short statement containing as many of the keywords as possible, possibly reusing the Description meta tag]">
<META name="revisit-after" content="[a number that is tuned to the amount of maintenance you do on the site - initially I use 7 because I perform so much tuning and generally I roll out content in a staged approach to ensure high quality and maintain control over the site's visitor growth] days">
<META name="rating" content="general">
- there are a number of options here for instance "adult", but I only use general
<META name="next" content="[choose or use your site metrics to research the next web page from your site that most visitors normally go to]">
- some web browsers (Firefox) will pre-cache the html page you specify here, making the user experience of your web site seem quicker, if they actually follow your "directions". Very difficult to get right without careful web site design, and if wrong actually wastes your visitors' bandwidth and makes their internet experience slower unnecessarily.
<META name="robots" content="index,follow">
- instruct search engines to index this web page, and follow all links on the page
- in the old days of restricted bandwidth, and depending on what I was marketing on the site, I would instruct the search engine to "noindex"
<META content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
- very important to clarify to the web browsers what the page content is, and which character set is intended otherwise some foreign visitors could end up with strange symbols unintentionally, making your web site difficult to use
Reasoning:
1. By using Meta Tags at all the search engines will rank you higher
2. By using the correctly completed Meta Tags, the search engines will rank you even higher
3. They should repeat your key messages you are trying to convey to your visitors - they serve as a check point for detecting if your message is clear and the page is correctly aligned to achieve maximum impact at the search engines AND visitors
4. Search engine spiders, web crawling bots, web caching servers and even web site blocker software use the tags in their "decision" software to decide whether to analyse, cache, or allow the page to be displayed.
And that is my Rule 9. I will be uploading the others as time allows!
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