By now, if you are reading this you are probably aware of the
importance of words on the Internet.
You are almost certainly aware that the search engine phenomena has
changed the way that websites work forever and that if your website
Is not found by search engines then the chances of it attracting
visitors is little to none. Sure you can pay for traffic by
advertising but why pay when your site can generate you traffic for
free? Advertising is only going to get more expensive, not cheaper!
80% of traffic to all websites is driven there by search engines.
And the 20% that is not driven there by search engines probably
started off getting to a site by search engines after which users
bookmarked the page, or remembered the URL, or forwarded the link to
their friends, or lastly, recalled the website address from memory
(yes, this is what offline marketers refer to as Brand
Recognition!).
We have always been of the opinion that if you are not a Coca Cola,
or an IBM, or an HP your chances of brand recognition driving you
traffic to your website via the offline media world are zero. It
does not matter about the here and now the immediate recollection of
a website URL from a magazine. Try to remember an URL that is not
Coca Cola, IBM or HP a few weeks after you typed it in feverishly,
copying it directly from a magazine
Chances are you wont recall it. And then you will use a search
engine to try and re-find what you have already found once by one
way or another!
The danger here is that if you are not found by the search engines
by that user at that moment in time, your competition will be. And
you just might lose a customer for good.
Its happening all over the world. Search is ALL IMPORTANT!
Keywords should relate to content
A search engine when it looks at your site can only understand
words. If we consider Google we know that Google knows every word on
a web page. It knows where every word is, and it knows where they
are in relation to each other. It knows the number of times a word
is repeated and it knows more or less what the web page is about.
If you take a look at any set of results that Google delivers you
will see that the results that Google lists comprise of a blue link
along with 2 lines of some black text under it and the actual
website address below this.
You will notice that the blue link at the top of the results is
the web page Title! This is the Title meta-tag that is contained
within the HTML of your webpage. If your webpage has a useless
irrelevant Title meta-tag, no matter how good the content is, Google
will penalise your site heavily.
As mentioned before, each web page must have its own Title. Google
lists this title as the first thing it displays on its results page
which should tell you that the Title tag is very important to
Google.
We know that Google looks at the Description meta-tag as well. At
least, at the time of writing it still does. And although it is
common knowledge that Google largely ignores the Keywords meta-tag,
we do know that from time to time Google will look at the Keywords
meta-tag, and that we have no way of knowing when Google will
suddenly start to look at these in more detail again.
It is thus vital to ensure that all three meta-tags are filled in,
that they are unique to each page and that they are relevant to the
content on that page.
There is a lot more to Search Engine Optimisation than this of
course. But these are three simple fields that are a lot of work to
fill in, but without doing this work which is something that is
directly under you control (we call it an on page factor), you have
no chance of ranking on any search engine anywhere for any search
term.
It is important to note that while we have just used Google as an
example, other search engines have different algorithms that do use
the Keywords meta-tag with far greater significance that Google. We
know for instance, that on a local South Africa search engine, Ananzi, that the Keywords meta-tag is vital to ranking success.
It all comes down to the same thing. Every page on every site needs
to have its Title meta-tag, its Description meta-tag and its Keywords
meta-tag code inserted into each page, and that the content of these
tags should be unique and relevant to that page.
When you think about it, it makes perfect common sense. That should
tell you immediately that this is the right way to structure your
web pages!
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