Site Boost Tip: Meta Data

If you saw my first blog-o-meter reading last week, you already know I’ve made good progress in improving my website’s ranking. Consistently now, my site is the first listing when you search for “Molly Ahearn” on google, yahoo or msn. That was my primary goal in recreating the site, so I feel pretty good about sharing how I did it.

In his course on search engine optimization on Lynda.com, Richard John Jenkins, explains the importance of including targeted, brief meta data on every web page. The page title is the only kind of meta data visible to the eye, appearing above the browser toolbar. Most people title their web pages, but many don’t add the equally powerful meta descriptions and keywords. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t despair, read on.

Jenkins’ figures out what meta data to add to each web page by extensively researching words people will be most likely to use in a search. All of the search engines offer free key word search tools for you to find out the number of times people have searched words and/or terms and suggest alternatives. Google’s is located at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2. In my case, it wasn’t rocket science. I wanted people to find my site by typing my name, or typing my name and Dutchess County fair, or my name and cowgirls, etc. If the goal of your site is to generate sales, I’d recommend developing a carefully selected group of keywords.

My site has about 25 pages. I am an organized person—to a fault some would argue—so I created a table with four columns: page name, page title, description and keywords. It was an easy way for me to keep all this data in one place and to visualize my strategy. Search engine spiders—a creepy name for the way the search engines comb through sites looking for information—are apparently not very bright. You need to repeat your key words a lot for them to hear you. In fact, it’s a good idea to include your select 3 to 5 key words in the page title, description, key word list AND MOST IMPORTANTLY in the actual text displayed on the web page. In the old Flash version of my site, I included meta titles, descriptions and key words, but I didn’t have any html text. That mistake alone prevented the spiders from understanding what my site was all about.

If you go to my home page you can match the text with the meta data I used.
Page title: Molly Ahearn / Fine Art Photography / Dutchess County / New York
Description: Molly Ahearn is a fine art photographer living in Dutchess County, New York.
Keywords: Molly Ahearn, fine art photography, New York, Dutchess County
(Richard, feel free to offer advice!)

How do you add this glorious stuff to your site? If you have a programmer, give them a text file with the meta data you’d like to include and they can add it for you. If you’re building your site with Dreamweaver, in the Common toolbar there’s an icon for inserting meta data. You click on it, and enter text into a popup window. I prefer to do this in html code view (believe it or not), because I can make sure that it’s added to the top of the page in the order it should: page title, description, keywords.

One other thing, you can see what meta data people are using on any given page by going to the browser’s (Firefox, Safari, etc.) View menu and selecting Page Source. A popup window opens with all of the html text, a frightening jumble of jargon. Look for the word meta in the top third of the page.

Hope this helps some of you get more traffic!