The Title

The title of your Website is the ideal place to get your keywords across. It’s important not just for search engines, but also to reach the user once they visit your site. If you use Microsoft Windows you’ll see the title in the top left hand corner of the browser’s window, and also on the task bar at the bottom of the screen.

It’s also used by many common search engines as a title for your link. Look at your favourite search engine and you’ll see that for each result they provide a two- or three-line summary, the first being a link, with a title. This title is often taken from the title tags on your site, so use it wisely.

Think carefully, as this is not only a key part of getting listed in the search engine, but also it is now your headline to attract the user to visit your site, and not the others listed in the results. Think carefully about what you say; newspaper headlines will give you some good clues as to a suitable style of writing.

Meta Tags

Some meta tags exist to allow the author of a site to specify the keywords for which the site should be indexed. Unfortunately, their purpose was open to abuse, with some Webmasters listing every keyword they could think of. As such, many search engines now ignore the tags or only use them in the site summary, so while still useful, they should be considered a backup, rather than a core, activity. Be careful, though, not to use a competitor’s name or the names of his products (or any trademarks) here, or you risk facing a legal challenge.

The ‘Description’ meta tag is used by some search engines as a summary description of your site when presenting the search results to your user. While not key to getting listed; it’s your chance to ensure they choose your site over the other results on the page.

The First Few Lines

Some search engines place greater emphasis on the first few lines that appear on your site, reasoning that these will provide an introduction to what is on the rest of the page. It is not only a good idea to do this for search engines, but also as a general rule to make it easy for your users to use the site.

The first few lines are commonly used as the two- or three-line description of your site that a search engine displays in its results. This is becoming more common than the description Meta tag.

Heading

Typically, when we write a book or report we use a short, succinct summary of the following paragraph as a header. We can do the same in HTML using the heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc), so you should use the headings appropriately. Use headings on your Website in the same way that you would when writing a book, or essay, and it will help your ranking.

The Copy

Ultimately, the biggest effect on your search engine ranking is likely to come from the copy on the page. Unless your site genuinely covers the topic suggested by your chosen keywords, these keywords are not likely to appear in the copy. Don’t try and artificially force your copy to include unrelated keywords as it is not going to read well, and having falsely attracted a user is likely to put them off ever returning.

It might be worth employing the services of a good copywriter or your in-house PR team to provide copy that reads well and contains the keywords required. Your off-line copy from marketing brochures may not be enough.

To understand how we would rework an off-line description for on-line users and search engines, let’s consider the following example. The Company provides legal advice to local businesses in Bath. The off-line copy is:

“Solicitor & Co Legal Services provides advice on all matters of tax law to local businesses”

This is fine as an off-line brochure, or press release, where the reader will know what local is, and can browse the brochure for further information about their services. However, if they specialise in Corporate Tax and IR35 then for the Internet it would need to be rewritten as:

“Solicitor & Co Legal Services provide advice on all matters of tax law, specialising in corporate tax law, and IR35. We are one of the main corporate tax law specialists in Bath.”

The other articles in this series are:

• Part One – Choosing Keywords
• Part Three – Off Page Factors

This post is part of my Internet business opportunities series.

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