Web Design ~ Marketing ~ Promotion ~ Strategic Development

Is Your Corporation Or Company Out There?

By John F. Wright

Snappy site, no visitors?

You’ve got a really snappy corporate or company web site, right? The site loads fast. It’s got just enough pizzazz without overdoing it. The pages are full of good, useful content. It's easy to navigate. You don't get many site visitors. Wait a minute. Back up to that last sentence. You're not getting visitors?

Okay, there might be a number of reasons why you're not getting visitors. For now let's talk about one that's easy to remedy and often overlooked. I'll tackle the others in upcoming articles.

Can your customer find you?

Let me ask you this: "Is your site set up so your potential customers can find you when they search the search engines?" By that I'm referring to your META tag data. Is it optimized so you can be found in search engine results? If it's not optimized there's a good chance that search engine spiders are not finding any data to report back to the search engines. And if they are finding anything it may not be accurate or up-to-date.

If you don't know what META tags are you'd better keep reading. In fact, why don't you go check with your webmaster to see if he or she knows what I'm talking about. The answer may surprise you!

What the heck is a spider?

What's a spider? Good question. Let's take a minute to review what a spider is and what it does.

Think about the thousands upon thousands of web sites out there and the millions upon millions of site pages. There’s no way mortal beings could ever find all of the new sites or update the sites the search engine already know about. Without the help of spiders search engine data would constantly be outdated.

Enter the spider. Their sole purpose is to go out on the "www" and find and retrieve information. They travel around looking for new sites and/or changes to existing sites. Once a search engine spider finds you you'll get visited on a regular basis--typically once every 4-6 weeks.

What are spiders looking for?

Many spiders don’t read the visible words on a page. Instead they go behind the pages to look for what’s called META tag data. Site visitors don't see this META information, only the spiders.

META tags are an efficient way to quickly retrieve information about a web site without having to scan the contents of each and every page. It's faster, more efficient and consumes less storage space on the search engine servers. However, it means your site webmaster must add and maintain this data.

Are META tags Important?

If you’re an Amazon.com, Pepsi Co or any other corporate giant, META tags probably aren't important. Everyone knows who they are and how to find them. But for other lesser known corporations, companies and small businesses, META tags become very important. Even so, you’d be surprised how many corporate and company sites I visit where their META tags are poorly written or worse yet, they don't even exist.

Of course, if the latter is true you are already an  Amazon.com or Pepsi Co corporate giant, right?

META that matters

There are basically three pieces of META information spiders look for:

Title – Short and sweet--usually the site’s name.

Description – Describes what the site’s all about. Uses words to evoke immediate interest and curiosity so a person is compelled to check out your site.

Keywords – Words or key phrases that someone might enter into a search engine to look for products or services like yours. The more specific and relevant the phrases the better chance of drawing someone to your web site.

Let’s take a look at what I’m talking about. Below are the META tags for Sell Your Web!

<title>Sell Your Web: Web Marketing, Advertising and Promotion Strategic Development.</title>

<META Name="Description" Content="Strategic web site development services to help you maximize your investment. Earn every dollar you deserve!">

<META Name="Keywords" Content="web promotion, web marketing, internet marketing, web advertising, web development, sell your web">

See how each tag contains relevant information about the site?

See what your competition's doing

Want to see your competitor’s META tags? It’s easy. Go to their web site. On your browser tool bar, go to "View" then "Source" (Internet Explorer) or "Page Source" (Netscape). A new window will open showing you the source code for that page.

Checking the source code of successful competitors could give you some insight into how you might improve your own META tags for better search engine visibility and rankings.

META tags are for home pages only... or are they?

Many web sites create META tags for their home page without even considering doing the same thing for all of their pages. Yep, spiders can find META tags for every page they index.

For your other pages the keywords may be the same, but only if they are relevant for those pages. If not, change them to better represent the actual page content. The META Title and Description will always be different for each and every page.

Take a look at the source code for other Sell Your Web! pages. Check out Sceneramic Photography too. In fact, go check out a few web sites.

Go tackle your META tags

Okay, now you know what META tags and spiders are and you've been out there looking at other web sites, go take a look at your own site. Do you have META tags? If you do, can they be improved? Do you have them for all your pages? Is the data outdated?

Bottom line, check your META tags and revisit them often. Keep them updated and fine-tune them until you find that magic formula that draws customers to your site! A little experimentation will go a long way!

Copyright © 2003 Sell Your Web!