A successful promotion strategy for your site on search engines makes use of the fact that search engines use software to determine how your site is indexed and how it's displayed. Here's what you need to pay attention to.
There is a coding device called a metatag. Metatags can be part of the underlying code of your site, which means they are not visible to visitors unless visitors view the source code.
Metatags are tags, which convey information about the total site. There are all kinds of metatags, but the two that matter most to you are the description tag and the keyword tag. Using these tags helps you get your site found using the words you think are best and displayed, using a description that you believe is accurate and will convince people to click.
The way many search engines work is like this. Their bot brings back information about your site. If part of that information is a description metatag, theyâll use that as the description of your site when results are displayed. If you don't have a description metatag, the search engine's program will do the best it can, usually merely reproducing copy and commands that show at the top of your page.
If you use the description metatag, many sites will use it to display results; and that gives you the opportunity to have your site describe the way you want. Write a short, tight, selling description of your site, one that describes it accurately and compels people to click through to see what's there.
That takes care of how your site's going to be displayed, but what are the keywords that folks should be using to find you? That's where the keyword metatag comes in. You get to select the best words for the search engine to use in indexing your site.
Pick those words based on your knowledge of your customers and prospects. What kinds of words do they think of to describe you? What words would they use searching for you on the site?
Where do you get those words from? The first, and most obvious place, is from your customers. Use their language.
In the early days of the Web, I was working with a real estate concern that was involved in selling high-end homes. The real estate agents involved had been in the business for quite awhile, and they had found that they sold more houses if they used the word "home" to describe the structure.
For that reason, when they set up their site originally, they assumed that people would use the word, "home" when they searched. But they didn't, or at least many of them didn't. What we found from talking to folks who answered the phone is that many of the people who called the real estate agent used the word, "house" to describe what they were looking for.
They would say something like, "I'm looking for a house in the Historic District.% Or, "I'm looking for a house with at least 2,500 square feet.%
Adding that word to our search list dramatically improved the results.
You should also be analyzing the keywords that folks use to search for you as they show up on your Web site logs. Log analysis is one of the most important things you can do to fine-tune your site.
You can also look at what the competition is doing. By asking around just a bit, you can probably find which sites in your industry generate lots of traffic. Go visit those sites, and take a look at their source code. What kinds of keywords are they using in their metatags?
Some of those keywords may be specific to your competitor's site, but many of them are likely to be variants of keywords, which will apply to your site but which you just haven't thought of yet. Try adding them to your metatag.
You should also do a bit of re-working of the initial copy on your site to make sure that it uses the keywords that you expect people to use to search.
Making It Work
Develop a short, benefit-riddled description tag that accurately describes to folks what's on your site and why they should visit it.
Develop your list of keywords based on the words that your customers and prospects would use to search for you. When in doubt, ask or observe.
If your keyword has a plural form that is the basic word with "sä or "esä added, then use the singular form. It will be found by searches for both the singular and plural. If it's an irregular form, use both the singular and plural.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 30 July 2002
This is only one Big Idea. You'll find more in Wally's book, What's the Big Idea? and in his Big Idea column. There's a complete list on the Main Big Idea page. You may also order the book by clicking here.
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