Far and away the most important of these meta tags is the <Title> tag.  Left click on your web page and select ‘View Page Source’  from the popup menu.  This will open a copy of the source code for that page in your browser window.  Near the top of the page will (or should) be the Title tag.  Google and other search engines attach a large degree of importance to the contents of this tag, and assume that it summarized the purpose of the page.  It is considered good form for the context of the Title to be consistent with the context of the text elsewhere on the page.  If those two contexts do NOT agree, you have a problem, because Google will deduct points from its appraisal of your page, and demote your page to the lower regions of their rankings for those subjects you are trying to promote.  An even more egregious error occurs when a page has no title.  This is the mark of an unprofessional developer.

Titles should be limited to 10 words at maximum.  And one should bear in mind that the search engines attach more importance to words at the beginning of a Title tag, as well as at the top of the page of text.

The Title tag should contain the name of the firm, and the keywords describing the items you are trying to promote on that page.  In addition, if your business is local in nature it would be wise to include the locale as part of the Title tag.  Don’t waste words like ‘the’ or ‘and’ or generic adverbs or prepositions in Title tags, because robots are trained to ignore them, and because they take up room that can be better employed.

Next in importance is the meta Description tag.  The text in this tag is the description that appears in the Google search results just below the clickable title of the page, which appears in the search results.  Obviously, the text in the meta description tag should be consistent with the text in the main body of the page.  If it is NOT consistent, see above: another deduction in Google’s appraisal of your offering.  Think of this tag as your opportunity to make a small tasteful commercial about your product.  It’s OK to be a little provocative, and give the reader a reason to buy/investigate further.  Meta description text should be limited to 160 characters (the limit Google will read).

Meta Keywords, are now of just marginal importance.  In the past, this tag was a catch-all summary of the keywords in the article/page.  As a result, developers would stuff this tag with repetitions of keywords and phrases that they thought users would search for.  But in recent years, search engines have gotten more sophisticated, and actually the text on the page itself is indexed.  So meta keywords has been relegated to a redundant opportunity for ambiguity.

The meta Robots tag tells the spiders whether or not to follow and index that page.  The default condition is to index and follow.

In our last article, Effective Web Marketing: Common Sense SEO Developing an Effective Keyword Strategy, we discussed the methodology of coming up with a successful keyword strategy.  This article discussed how to keep those successes.  At the outset, you should understand that building a site that successfully attracts search engines yields neither immediate nor persistent results.  It takes time to test, analyze, optimize, and adjust web pages for the desired results.  This is only partly because search engines index your pages at infrequent and unpredictable intervals, but also because their methods for evaluating the pages are constantly evolving and growing more sophisticated over time.

In addition, the thousands of competitors (and non-competitors) using similar keywords are goring in number and sophistication.  At some point you may be competing for position with a new popular movie which has similar keywords to the ones you have used to describe your product.  And all of those competing sites want to accomplish the same thing you do: achieve high page 1 ranking for their site.

I like to tell clients to think of their website as analogous to a store front.  If a store is in a good neighborhood with lots of foot traffic (well optimized in the SEO sense), it will generate lots of interest.  But if the client  does little to promote the site or chooses a failing strategy, few people will know it’s there, or be interested even if they do come across it.  If a store with good traffic goes on the cheap and dresses the window in brown paper, and wire mannequins, few will stop to look.  And if the owner kept the window looking the same year after year, especially when other stores were changing their windows to reflect the new styles and seasons, it will attract little interest because it appears that the owner doesn’t care.  Similarly, websites need to change their content and appearance to attract new customers, and to refresh interest from the search engines.

Like Eddie Murphy’s character, Axel Foley, in Beverly Hills Cop where he’s a “biness man always poppin’ and movin””, that’s what a successful website has to do too.  Search engines like sites with new and fresh content, and so do readers.  And so do website owners, because an up-to-date site ensures that the site will be able to compete effectively.  Visualize your website as a salesman who sells your product or services.  You should expect to spend about as much on your website which you expect to draw in new customers, as you would pay a good salesman!

In the beginning of the web era, there was a school of thought that would stoke the copy with keywords, and even put invisible keywords to fool the robots, but be unavailable to the human reader.  The search engines have long since gotten wise to such scams, and now penalize sites who try such stunts.  The strategy today is to write for the readers (with a nod to scoring moderately for keyword density) and produce interesting, informative fresh copy that is of value to the user.  In the process, there’s plenty of time and space to promote your product or service.  But it’s not too different from selling in the real world:  if you try to scam the customer, he’ll eventually figure out the game and won’t do business with you anymore.

However, if you use the medium to build an honest, helpful and informative conversation with the customer, the market as a whole will be healthier, and you will get your fair share of business because you are providing extra value for the customer.

It is the main job of anyone who is engaged in search engine optimization to make that website friendly and hospitable to search engines.  Help them do their job, and do not adopt the attitude that you can co-opt them.  Ig you push that envelope too far, the engines will penalize you by deducting points from your page, or, in extreme cases, by refusing to index your pages at all.

It’s important to understand that a search engine sees ONLY text.  It can’t understand pictures, or movies, or Flash files or any graphics.  Only words and text are indexed by the search engine.  It can see code, but disregards it.  And the text which it sees, the search engine will try to put that text into some intelligent context to help assign some meaning when it matches the text to a search.  Different search engines accomplish this task in slightly different ways, but the basics are the same.

The better search engines accept site maps.  These are XML files that show all of the indexable pages (or files) on a site, along with information about the files, such as creation date, most recent update date, and its position in the site hierarchy.  These files are very helpful to the search engine in evaluating the site, and, in fact, submission of one will frequently bring about a new reindexing of the site when it is submitted.

Search engines attach more weight to text at the beginning of a page.  Text which matches phrases found in the Title of the page is assigned an especially important ranking, and text which is further down the page is assigned a diminished importance.  Some engines lose patience as they get further and further down a page, and quit indexing after a certain point.  So a page with lots and lots of javascript code near the top of the page may be thumbing its nose at the search engine, and will possibly be rewarded with a low ranking because of that.  If you must use javascript in your pages, annex that code to a separate file, and reference that file in the HTML.

Strictly speaking, not all search sites are search engines.  Yahoo!, for instance, is a directory where sites are indexed by hand by a staff of people who categorize sites.

But in the search engine category, Google is the 800 pound gorilla.  It has nearly an 80% share of the global market today, though this has shrunk nearly 3% in the past year, as Yahoo!’s share has brown from 9% to 12%.  So, obviously, it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to what Google is doing.

Google has two forms of placements in their pages.  One is AdSense, a Pay-per-Click (PPC) program where subscribers pay for each phrase they wish to advertise under.  Those paid ads appear either on the top of the google page, or on the right of the page, depending on your chosen Google page format, when a user searches for a phrase that matches the one paid for.  Each time the advertiser’s ad appears, Google charges his account an amount varying on the placement premium the PPC client has agreed to pay.

The rest of the Google pages are printed the ‘free’ or organic search results.  The objective is to construct your web page such that your page ranks high in the organic search listing.  Now the actual formula Google (and the other search engines) use to determine which sites get a high ranking, and which do not is a highly guarded secret.  And it is ever changing, and varies from search engine to search engine.  If it were publicized, everyone would adjust their web pages to accommodate the formula, thus defeating the purpose of the formula.  Not only does the ranking formulae change constantly, but the demand for those key phrases is ever changing, as is the re-working of sites all jockeying for position in the competition for high visibility.

Most users tend to favor the organic search results.

So the takeaway from this article is that prime placement in the organic rankings is a very valuable asset, but it is fleeting and ever buffeted by changes in competition, formulaic changes in the search engines, and even with rank of other pages in the website.  Second, because of all of the diverse forces at play, the placement of a website in any given search listing will fluctuate according to ALL of those factors.  So it is not possible to control your site’s placement in a search result – you can only hope to influence it.  Having said that, it is clear that search engines bestow honors on sites that produce fresh, new content that is helpful to the consumer, and that is well organized with good links.

In many cases, developers have cookie cutter templates that create sites that can be put up in a matter of days.  The average developer can put up a credible site that looks good and that will satisfy their customers’ desires for a web presence rather cheaply and profitably.  And then he will move on to the next customer with his offer to build an inexpensive website.  They have fulfilled their part of the bargain.  And in the process have not only benefited from harvesting the low hanging fruit from the client, but have left the client with an (in many cases) appealing looking site that in many cases gets in the way of the client’s attaining what he really needed in the first place: an effective tool that will enhance his marketing presence on the web.  For years, web developers have included Flash files and fancy Javascript in websites that until recently were completely ignored by search engines.  But that is only one of the many SEO faux pas that have been commonplace practice by naive ‘drive by’ web developers.

A far better approach is to settle on the marketing (SEO) strategy first, and then make the web development process serve those marketing aims.  That way, menus can be designed intelligently, and in a way that conforms naturally to the objectives of the site.  The site as a whole can be planned and developed with an eye to leading the potential client on a journey that is a surrogate to having a conversation with the client.

This is the ONLY way that endeavors of this type make any sense.  The usual way is tantamount to firing a gun before aiming it.

I organized a white water rafting trip several years ago down the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania.  Because my group of friends all lived in NJ near New York City, I arranged for everyone to stay at a charming hotel in Pennsylvania, just over the border from NJ, with the idea of completing the journey early the next morning.  As it happened, staying at the Hotel that same evening was a ‘convention’ (about 25) of various practioners of the occult and paranormal.  There were palm readers, hypnotists, phrenologists, astrologers, and all manner of strangeness.  I played piano for everybody for a while in the parlor, and afterward, the two groups mingled and discussed affairs of the day, and their respective professions.  To a man the paramormal folks seemed to be obsessed with tearing down their peers, and trying to appear to be the unchallenged spokesman of their particular branch of the field. ‘She’s a fraud’, or ‘He hasn’t discovered anything in years’ or ‘I have a new discovery which has revolutionized the field of astrology’ were typical ‘confidential’ comments made to members of our group in private conversations.  We all laughed and compared notes the next day.

So it is with our profession.There are many who claim to have the keys to the kingdom.  Whether or not they do will only be determined in the future, and someone is always changing the locks.

So in the weeks ahead, I’ll be blogging a series of articles about common sense web marketing and SEO that has proved quite effective in the past.  But today’s take away is to begin with a comprehensive plan: what you are selling, how it will be sold and marketed, what platform you will use, and how easy it will be for you to adjust your message, product listing and how to market on each of the important search engines, and social media.  You won’t need fancy software to do this. For my clients I use Microsoft OneNote for the narrative portions and to flesh out the strategies, and Microsoft Excel to keep track of the metrics and benchmarks.