Google Meta-Tags and Me

eatmosushi

Heyo

So my company's web development / marketing department is making a website


I'm new around here, but I'm also a partial owner of the company, and the higher ups on the totem pole want me assissting with the grunt work (to get a taste of the ol' labour grind)


It has been made clear to me that I need to learn/understand google meta tags and something called SEO Keywords (or some such? I know SEO was in it)


Any free wikis or faqs I can read that would more or less give me the gist of whats what?

Cheers!

eatmosushi

i'll be helping with putting images and tags into the Content Management System that was made for us

Jasconius

SEO, of all internet concepts, is probably the one most prone to abject misinformation and deception.

My official answer to you is that SEO, especially keywords and meta tags, is less than 10% of what actually will make a site popular, trafficked, or otherwise successful.

The easiest way to make your site pervasive in a search engine is to actually make a website that people are interested in (which usually goes well beyond a basic company brochure site). Otherwise, in terms of exposure, make your site as informative and useful to your existing customers as possible so that they will be inclined to pass it along to their friends and business partners as well.

As far as keywords go, the easy route tends to be specificity, either by location or actual trade terms.

If your company makes metal plates for example... odds are it's going to be very hard to get a first page ranking for "metal plates". However, it's much easier to be a first pager or even #1 for "florida metal plates", "southeast metal plates", "miami metal plates", or something like "metal plates with such and such feature".

Specificity narrows your search competition, and there's no limit to how many specific terms you can use, and typically you'll see faster results if you use that approach. Going the broad route requires a lot more work and effort.

eatmosushi

nail polish X:

Jasconius

Well, that sounds like a horse of a different color.

I assume that you are a vendor of some sort for retail outlets? Unless you really feel that retail buyers are actually doing google searches for new product, I don't see the virtue in pursuing a search campaign. It depends entirely upon your business model and who your target audience is... I was under the assumption from your previous thread that you were more like a Business to Business operation.

eatmosushi

oh, well, i guess i should have provided more details!

we manufacture the polish (along with other spa products)
we do consumer level retail on our website
we provide salons directly via a call center, traveling sales people, and the website
we sell to large salon supply wholesalers that then sell our products

our website will target mainly the base end user and the salons/spas

eatmosushi

well, we actually already HAVE a site, but we're fully renovating it to
a. be more useful for us and our customers
b. get better google hits

flatlinegraphics

as far as google goes, keywords are at best looked at, and at worst ignored. google runs its weighting on content and inbound/outbound links. other engines may or may not pay attention to them. they are just too easy to stuff with bad info.

best things to concentrate on are descriptive titles, meta descriptions, and good, accessible content. make sure everything has valid semantic markup (h1-5 tags, strong, em, ps, etc). make a sitemap.xml file, and submit it. get a google webmasters account and stats, and start tracking what is pulling people in.

SEO is kind of a dark art, and it should never be the end all of your marketing strategy.

Spam

flatlinegraphics wrote: »

best things to concentrate on are descriptive titles, meta descriptions, and good, accessible content. make sure everything has valid semantic markup (h1-5 tags, strong, em, ps, etc). make a sitemap.xml file, and submit it. get a google webmasters account and stats, and start tracking what is pulling people in.

I do most of the product info and some of the SEO for my company's ecommerce websites, and this is exactly what I do too - Descriptive titles, pages with good content, meta descriptions, meta keywords (alternative descriptions/brand/type in here too). Google loves H tags as well (apparently more so than meta tags) so make sure and use them.

Plus make sure and submit your sitemaps to the other search engines too, not just google (Bing/Live, Yahoo, Ask.com etc usually have webmaster tools for this). And use the webmaster tools for each search engine to check that all your sitemaps links work and all your backlinks work too.

Lautermilch

Sitemaps are a big help. I tried out a number of them and like GSitecrawler. Here is a sitemap that it created for one of my forums - http://thintheherd.info/sitemap.xml .

The search engine logic is kept secret and changes. As others have said, content, H-tags, sitemaps are key. But I will backlinks are helping in getting spider visits and one thing that none of us can change is time. I can see the spiders that visit my sites and saw several examples of spiders visiting but not indexing. The act of indexing is when your pages are added to the search engine database. Google added my sites in ten days but it was over five weeks before any of the content was indexed and the only answer you will get is you have to wait.

There are also at lot of SEO forums out there as well.