Operating a small business in today’s economy places you up against stiff competition from big business and corporations. Any small business must have a plan and implement strategies to secure, retain and grow its’ market-share. One major drawback to this is funding and business capital. Generally the big budgets for marketing and advertising are just not there with small to medium sized businesses and startups.

One of the key points of any campaign is repetition, getting your name, brand, and/or product out there and recognizable. Repetition involves making the investment to at times do the same things over and over again to produce strong results. Long growth curves, expensive repetition of expenses to generate a growing business and extended profitability creation are not strong points for a business owner and often difficult if not impossible to commit too and stick with.

Instead, they will need to develop other ways to promote their brand/product/service without spending a huge amount of money to achieve it. The most cost effective way with the greatest impact and reach to achieve this is through search engine optimization or SEO for short.

Keep in mind that anyone can build a Website, but a Website does not generate traffic and build an audience just because it is on the web. Optimized content that appeals to a certain audience and is actively targeted to reach them is key.

There are several key factors why SEO is important for any small business on the web.

It will enable the growing businesses owner to reach out to their target market. Lets face it, yellow page advertising is expensive and ask yourself these two questions.

When was the last time you used the yellow pages instead of a search engine?

Do you even know where in your home or business the yellow pages are kept?

No matter how great your Website might be, it’s worthless if no one ever sees it! SEO, if done effectively, aids and enables you to increase the amount of visitors that frequent your Website, which may increase business and ultimately profits into your business.

SEO is also vital in that it creates opportunity to transform those visitors into customers. This is done through implementation of a spread of different systems beginning with content and ease of usability usually ending up in profit.

Additionally, SEO will help you build your reputation and creates brand recognition by enabling your site name and links to be put in front of countless potential customers via search engine results. When you take the time to properly optimize your Internet site it will increase your overall user experience and customer loyalty if the transaction is handled properly. Similarly, it helps your visitors find the information that they are looking for quickly and effectively.

Appearing in as many relevant search results on hopefully the first page enables any business to put their name and brand in front of people in places and markets never before available on the worldwide scale that the Internet has created. With E-commerce sales consistently posting positive gains and consistently taking market-share away from brick and mortar based businesses, what business shouldn’t have some sort of web presence?

More often than not, the results far outweigh the expenditure and cost effectiveness vs the cost effectiveness of traditional print marketing cannot even compare. Take the time to prioritize SEO and optimize your Website correctly. The visitors as well as the profit will soon follow.

Furthermore, with SEO you will have the power to influence and at times control your competitors. This is because a well optimized web site will bring more visitors to your Internet site which in turn grows your brand awareness and hopefully increases market-share.

In the end, SEO is certainly essential to small businesses simply because it will help them lower their across-the-board risk. This is due to the fact that our market reach is worldwide, lowering the impact of decreased demand in any one area or region. This is actually one of the more unique and often neglected advantages to SEO.

Advantage Ecommerce Solutions is your total package for E-commerce consulting and market-share domination. Whether you are just establishing your web presence, are in need of design and consulting or are ready for some new strategies to expand your market-share and dominate your competition, we work with any company any size. Schedule your free consultation today and let us show you how we can help.

.

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Marketing On A Limited Budget With SEO

Ecommerce, the final frontier! The Internet is growing at an annual rate of over 20%. There are over 1 billion users on the Internet and that number is expected to double in less than 10 years and eCommerce sales are expected to double in less than 7 years.

Today marks the 25th anniversay of the first .com registration. The anniversary coincides with research by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) that found that the internet economy drives more than $1.5 trillion (£990bn) in global annual economic activity. Do you sell your products online? Do you want a piece of that trillion dollar pie?

The key to successful eCommerce starts with the product detail page, optimization, picture file size and presentation and usability. With the rise of social media and Web 2.0 came the social bookmarking, fan pages, add this and the most important of all – user reviews. Below, I have outlined my process for optimizing eCommerce product detail pages. It is simple, yet a time proven tactic that brings solid success everytime I’ve used it.

• Product Title – Have the product name / service first, then your brand name, Air Jordans | Nike
• Product Name – Always use hi tags for the product name
• Product Description – Whenever you can, always try to standardize the description with at least the product / service name and category name. The more detailed information you can provide, instructions, how to’s, the higher the conversion rate from viewers to buyers.
• Product Image – Always name the image with the full product name. Never resize the image using html code, resize it with your editing software and repost. Always include image size in the html and make good use of alt tags. Use a picture size that serves the product well, 250px by 250px is a good size if only using one. Best practice is the more pictures the better, but utilize smaller sized images on the product page.
• Product Image Detail – Always make the product image clickable opening a larger image.
  Amazon and ebay suggest no smaller than 1000px for the detail image.
• Store your images on a cookieless subdomain or content delivery network for faster loading and parallel downloads.
• Bread Crumb Nav – Include a Bread Crumb Nav on all product pages showing ever level to the product.
• Social Bookmarking – Always include social bookmarking and promoting buttons or an add this bar to enable users to promote and bookmark your products.
• RSS Feed – give users the opportunity to subscribe to your product rss feed.
• Site Navigation – Ensure site navigation is clear, concise and consistent.
• FAQ or Help pages – Ensure the process to get assistance or access the FAQ is simple and obvious on every page.
• Policies and Returns – Ensure all policies and return procedures are clear, concise and fair.
• Price / Value – Carefully consider your pricing v.s. the competition. If you cannot compete on the price, ensure that you offer superior service, detail pages and easily accessible shipping options.
• User Product Reviews – Positive reviews are probably the single biggest call to action for any product. Todays’ shopper is 5 times more likely to purchase a product that displays user reviews than products that do not display reviews.

Advantage Ecommerce Solutions is a full service Design, SEO, Marketing and Ecommerce Consulting company. Would you like to expand your market, increase sales and grow your ROI? Contact Advantage Ecommerce Solutions for a free site analysis and review to help take you to your next level of success.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twenty-five years of .com celebrated today (v3.co.uk)
• Hearst’s Social Shopping Site Kaboodle Gets A Real-Time Makeover (techcrunch.com)
• ShopVisible Launches Facebook Application to Expand Sales Channels for Online Retailers (eon.businesswire.com)
• eCommerce in the Next Decade – What’s Your Experience? (blogs.adobe.com)

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | How To Optimize An Ecommerce Product Detail Page

Year in and year out we see adjustments in search engine requirements and new scripting techniques. The later part of 2009 brought many quiet changes in SEO and some major announcements as well. Being good at something starts with being ‘Brilliant At The Basics”. HTML and how a page is coded should follow some basic standard guidelines to ensure search engine readiness and optimization. Most if not all of these should be rock solid before a site is launched. They seem simple but without them, you face search engine uncertainty. Google announced earlier in 2009 that it no longer reads the meta keywords. Don’t write them off though, they are now more important than ever.

Follow these basic SEO coding standards and utilize your keywords to ensure proper search engine placement.

Title Tag – No more than 70 characters

Recommended Title Tag Syntax Keyword < Category | Website Title

Meta Description - No more than 155 characters

Common Canonical Homepage Issue -
Great – http://www.mysite.com/
Unacceptable – http://www.mysite.com
http://mysite.com/
http://www.mysite.com/index.html
http://mysite.com/index.html

To condense the four default homepages into one homepage, use 301 redirects to correct for erroneous incoming links and make all internal links point to your domain using the syntax ‘http://www.mysite.com/’. Always include trailing “/” on folders.

H1,H2,H3 -
<h1>Most Important</h1>
<h2>Second Most Important</h2>
<h3>Third Most Important</h3>

Bold, Strong – <b>Keyword</b>

Image – <img src=”keyword.jpg” alt=””keyword”/>

Hyperlink – <a linkindex=”334″ href=”http://www.mysite.com/webpage.html” title=””keyword””>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Hyperlink – <a linkindex=”335″ href=”http://www.mysite.com/webpage.html” title=””keyword”>(No Followed) rel=”nofollow”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Page File Size- No more than 150 kilobytes (Before Images, and other Attachments)

Amount of links – No more than 100 unique links per page

As you can see, keywords are still very important. Its best to use what would be your meta keywords for each page as your outline or frame of reference from which to write. I try to keep a list of my targeted keywords on my desk as I write pages and posts. then as you layout the coding for your page, your keywords will remain consistent. So while Google may not read your meta keywords, blatantly ignoring the inherent advantages may be a fatal mistake. Did I miss anything obvious?

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Using Keywords – Important SEO HTML Basics

Social Media Marketing or ‘buzz’ marketing allows your company to create conversations in a targeted market segment, facilitating greater brand awareness, thus adding measurable value to your brand.

Traditional advertising is static, the motivation is generally not changing. It may take Coke 9 months from first thought to actually launching a traditional media campaign. Welcome to the 21st Century, ‘real time’, always on – advertising. Social Media does not sleep, ever! If it takes you more than 4 hours to 2 days to fine tune your message, you missed ‘the moment’ to maximize potential for your campaign.

Social Media campaigns are more than just the latest fad. To launch a successful social media campaign, you must have a firm knowledge of who you want to influence and the emotions you need to connect with for target audience engagement. Connect with the public in ways that facilitate them wanting to get involved and continue the conversation without you.

‘Viral Marketing‘ occurs when a message explodes like wildfire.

The faster it spreads, the greater the impact. Combining today’s technology with real-time data shortens the development curve drastically and up front investment. Marketers can take chances and jump at opportunities of the moment like never before.

A new playing field calls for new rules. Impressions used to be king. Today it is more than just views, it’s about the measurement of engagement, real-time data. How are people connecting with your content? Use your data to understand how people are interacting with your content in a direction that continues the conversation. How many retweets occurred? Emails to friends from your content? All readily available tools and metrics.

A perfect example is the recent debacle on the Tonight Show with Conan O’brien. He was in dispute with NBC because they wanted to give the host position back to Jay Leno and remove him, due to no fault of his own. Create a simple flash animation of ‘Talk show Host Shooting Gallery’ sponsored by your company. Pick from Jay Leno or Conan O’brien, reach a certain score and maybe it will unlock David Letterman and Oprahs’ voice could be the announcer. Bam, overnight hit!

The trending topic on twitter was Jay and Conan, market your flash to that audience, next your animation becomes the trending topic. Tomorrow night all of the talk shows mention it and some even show it. By the following morning, the news becomes how your companies animation is sweeping the net, TV and Social Media, driving a % of traffic back to you, creating brand awareness and recognition. Possibly even Oprah will give it a plug on her show as well.

Trends in buzz, viral and word-of-mouth marketing are now tracked and monitored to further refine their marketing strategies. Success means being ready to jump into the fray quickly and strike while the topic is ‘HOT’. Google Search indexing predicted the release of the latest round of MacBooks and iMacs based on minute Apple advertising activity it picked up worldwide weeks before Apple announced anything publicly. When Google Search begins predicting stocks and Superbowl winners weeks early, then we have a problem.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Media is a Battlefield (debaird.net)
• Leno and Letterman have some fun with a little help from Oprah in Super Bowl spot. (latimesblogs.latimes.com)

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | How To Create A Viral Social Media Campaign

We are often asked ‘how do I calculate Return on Investment(ROI) on a Pay Per Click(PPC) campaign?’ Or ‘how do I calculate whether I should invest in a PPC campaign or services?’

Assuming you know some statistics about your site, I will explain using the following example:

Lets say your budget affords you to be able to allocate $2000. per month to Pay Per Click advertising. After bidding, your average cost per click is 35 cents. Assume you generated enough clicks to use your entire budget. $2000 divided by 35 cents is 5714 clicks to your site.

Historically 5% of your site visitors converts to a sales lead (sale, lead generation, goal attainment, etc..). 5% of 5714 is 286 sales leads generated. You also know from your own historical data that your average sale is $72.00. 286 sales at $32.00 each is $9152.00 in sales generated by your PPC campaign that month, minus the $2000. initial investment and you have a Return On Investment of $7152. for the month.

In general, most PPC Services will give you an even higher ROI because we focus on your campaign while you do what you need to do – run your business. Lets say that instead of a 5% conversion rate, the PPC Service generates 8.5% conversion. Starting with the same 5714 clicks, 8.5% is 486 conversions @ $32.00 avg sale equalling $15552 in PPC sales for the month or a ROI of $13552. That is an additional $6400. by using the PPC Service.

There are plenty of companies out there that will try to charge you that kind of money for this service, but reputable ones do not on that size of an initial budget.

To request a FREE website consultation & analysis, contact AES. Be sure to ask about our January Blog Specials.

Please leave comments, we welcome your thoughts and ideas.

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | How To Calculate ROI On A Pay Per Click Campaign

Pay Per Click advertising is a Search Engine Marketing Strategy that requires that you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad taking them to your site. The fee is the amount that you pre-bid on how much you are willing to pay per click based on a selected keyword or keyword string vs. the other bidders. Your bid affects placement of your ad in relation to the other bids. You only pay each time someone actually clicks the ad and visits your site.

Optimally, the ultimate goal with any PPC campaign is conversions. Conversions are the amount of click-throughs that are converted into your goal, normally making a sale or receiving a lead etc…. Since 80% of all searches online are done on search engines, the more exposure that you receive on search engines, both naturally and paid, the more traffic you should receive. Search engine placement naturally for any given term where you want the listing to appear can both take a lot of your efforts and take a long time to achieve. PPC cuts the time to time invested setting it up and monitoring the bids. Hence, producing traffic and conversions much faster.

The key objectives of any PPC campaign are to maximize impressions, clicks and conversions once they are on your site while minimizing cost per conversion.

Four ‘Best Practices’ to enhance to any PPC campaigns success are:

Keyword Research and Targeting – prior to launching any campaign you must research your keywords and phrases. It is also to your advantage to analyze what keywords your competition is targeting. Target the ‘long-tail’ phrases. For example, bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard’ is going to be both expensive and very competitive. The person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard’ may or may not be just beginning their search. Bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ will cost less, have less competitors bidding on the same phrase and the person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ has most likely already narrowed down their search and be closer if not at the final decision stage of their searching.

Creative Ad Copy – research PPC ad copy strategy. There are plenty of tools available like Keyword Spy, Link Diagnosis, Wordtraker and others that will help you analyze the current ads including performance stats. From this information, you should be able to formulate a reasonably successful, creative Ad.

Bid Management – If you cannot manage your bids daily, most people cannot, hire a service like ours or if necessary, use a 3rd party bid management tool. The 3rd party tool is much better than not monitoring it at all, but using a service usually more than pays for itself just in bid savings. Why pay 75 cents for even 1 click when the next highest bidder just dropped his bid to 25 cents?

Tracking, Reporting and ROI Analysis – Without feedback, you cannot improve. The amount of data that can be retrieved and analyzed from a PPC campaign can be mountainous. Look specifically a keyword performance, specific Ad copy performance, conversion rate and of course, ROI.

In conclusion, the money that you spend mounting a PPC campaign and specifically utilizing a PPC service such as the service offered by AES through our site will far out weigh the loss in sales that you are experiencing and your competitors are reaping by not having a PPC campaign and letting then reap the rewards.

Look for our next post titled ‘How To Calculate ROI On A Pay Per Click Campaign’. Please leave comments, we welcome your thoughts and ideas.

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Elements of Successful Pay Per Click Advertising

I hear these two words mis-stated on a regular basis. It seems to me that people don’t quite understand the difference so I thought I would clarify it with a blog post. They are very similar, but e-commerce is a function of e-Business and thats where the clarification is needed.

E-business is defined as “A business that operates partially or primarily over the Internet, usually providing services to other businesses.” by wictionary.org. E-commerce is described as “commercial activity conducted over the internet”.

Any business cnducted via the web or over the web would then become e-Business. e-Commerce is a function or a feature of e-Business. All e-Business is not e-Commerce. For example. Jim Bob owns a plumbing store/company and has a static/brochure website built to maintain a web presence, add himself to local search, and make his services searchable and findable for online users. He sells nothing over the internet. His static/brochure website is conducting e-Business by acting as an advertising platform and virtual storefront for his business.

Jenny Sue owns a custom Teddy Bear Store on the internet. You go to her site, pick and order your bear, it is made, shipped and delivered to you. She has no brick and mortar storefront. Jenny is conducting e-Commerce over the internet through her commercial activity. He e-Commerce site is an e-Business as it performs and operates a business or business acitvities on the web.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to set up an e-commerce site using PayPal to process (arstechnica.com)
• PRWeb Inks Partnership with the eCommerce Merchants Association (prweb.com)
• Google Faces a Different World in Italy (nytimes.com)
• Rural Broadband Stimulus and Why Domain Investors Should Care (brucemarler.com)

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | E-Business vs. E-commerce

• Assuming that your site looks perfect in all browsers just because it looks good in your own. Not cross browser testing a site before it’s posted online is a major web sin.



Image by samuelcarvalhodg via Flickr

• Fixed font size. Web designers take power too seriously at times using CSS to turn off the adjust text browser button on the end users machine. Most standard text is just to small. Now that I’m a little bit older, I feel the pain. Leave my font choices alone.
• Flash Intros, Flash sites, excessive bells, whistles and hoopla. There is a time and a place for anything. I would like to be able to choose my time and place. If your going to do it, at least have a skip intro button available for those of us that do not care and/or those still on slow connections.
• Popup windows, windows that open countless other windows and windows that push yet another window in your face after you hit the close button asking if you are sure you don’t want to chat with customer service before you leave. Does this need any further explanation?
• Writing to an audience other than the audience that will be reading it. Example….writing a book instead of a blog entry. This is the web – Short, Sweet and to the Point!
• I hate PDF’s and waiting for them, however, the worst part is when I have to register and give personal information first just to get the pdf link to download. I have dummy email addresses just for that purpose. I check them, they are just not my everyday email addresses.
• Customer Service on a merry go round. I reorganized a customer service department a few years back made up of two people. One answered every question with a rambling riddle that resembled English but was not. The other answered every question with a question. They actually had people regularly email them back saying, “hello you did not answer my question”. Frustrating, very frustrating!
• Customer Service outsourcing to nations where their grasp of the English language is unlike our own or the accent is so thick they cannot be understood. I have tone deafness in both ears. It’s hard enough for me to understand some people face to face let alone around the world and not pronouncing words as I know them. I end up having to say “what did you say” so many times, I’m sure they get mad.
• Visited Site links that do not change color is an issue for me. I normally have so many tabs working…this is the 21st Century..multitasking, that I never remember which links I have looked at and not looked at. Having visited liinks that do not change color after visiting confuses me and gets me irritated. I have a simple fix though. I enter the CSS for the page through Firefly and change it so when I am looking at the page….it is right for me
• Last but not least…my biggest blunder of them all…. Not using the spell checker. Duh, it only takes one push of a button. I think they call that a no-brainer and it makes a terrible first impression. Need I say more?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Context-based Text Correction Now Available from Ginger Software (prweb.com)
• Wix Launches How To Website (prweb.com)
• Spell checking in AIR, Flash, and Flex! (blogs.adobe.com)
• The Evolution of Web Design (sixrevisions.com)
• Don’t rely on your spell-checker! (alpup.blogspot.com)

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Top 10 Web Design and E-Business Mistakes

It does not matter what you call them: vodcasts, vidcasts, videocasting, or video podcasting… there are a few behind-the-scenes actions you can take to help attract more attention to your video productions. Just like websites, it does not matter how amazing the content is if interested people are unable to find it.

Use the following suggestions to help increase the exposure your videos receive…

1. Use Keywords

In Video File Name Insert keywords in the name of the video file. When determining what keywords to use, do not simply rely on intuition; do research, just as you would for a website, to see what relevant terms people are searching on.

2. Create Video Feed

Create an RSS feed of all videos in a collection. Each feed item should contain a different video in the enclosure field. Optimize the feed using related keywords. For additional help, there is a Videocasting Feed Creation Tutorial available at http://www.feedforall.com/videocasting-tutorial.htm .

3. Increase Exposure

Host your videos on YouTube, and embed the video into your website, which will increase the video count on YouTube. The more popular a video seems to be, themore exposure it will receive.

4. Video Name And Description

In the video name and description fields, use keywords that relate to the content of the video. Create a compelling yet relevant title and description that will encourage people to click-through.

5. Google Video Sitemap

Create a video sitemap for the search engines. For details on what to include in such sitemaps, Google has provided specifications in their Google Webmaster Central Blog at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/introducing-video-sitemaps.html .

6. Meta Data

Include meta data in the video file. The newer video search engines will often rely on meta data to produce relevant results. Many video editing products will allow you to edit and customize the meta data associated with the video file, and you should use this the same way you would use the meta data for a webpage.

7. Optimize Landing Page

Optimize the landing page on the website, embed the video in a webpage on your website, and then use standard SEO techniques to optimize that webpage for the search engines. Use keywords that relate to the video on the page that contains the video.

8. Transcripts

Provide a text transcript of the video, both on the landing page and in the RSS feed for the video.

9. Embed URL In Video

Brand the video with your logo in the initial video splash screen, and include your website address on the bottom of the video to increase your brand exposure.

10. Leave Them Wanting More

The video should be a teaser and leave the audience wanting more. Engage the audience, but try to encourage the viewer to visit the website or view other videos to learn more.

11. Submit YouTube Feed

YouTube creates an RSS feed for every user account that is created. In addition to manually creating an RSS feed, you can also use the YouTube feed to promote your videos. The formatting details for the YouTube video feeds can be found at http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/username/uploads (replace “username” in the url with your own YouTube account username).

12. Anchor Text

When linking to the video, use anchor text that contains keywords which relate to the video.

13.Video Submission

Submit the video to all the video websites and video podcast websites. Here are a couple of resource sites to get you started…

Podcast & Video Submissions - http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm

140 Places to Submit Your Video List - http://www.stephanmiller.com/my-link-lists/140-place-to-submit-your-video-list/

14. Tag Video

Tag the video on the video networks with relevant keywords, making it is easier for people to find when they search on those keywords.

15. Track Views

Track and review the number of views that a video receives. If you find that a substantial number of viewers are abandoning the video before completion, the chances are good that the video is too long and could benefit from trimming.

16. Social Bookmarking

Use social bookmarking to draw additional attention to videos. This will also help with the number of incoming links, which in turn will help improve search engine ranking.

Videos are the latest marketing channel. In order to make the most of it, optimize the video and increase the exposure it receives.

About the Author:

Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio

recording and editing software.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Guest Post by Michael Hoffman: Why Nonprofits Should Be on YouTube (beth.typepad.com)
• Build a dynamic local community news resource on Twitter in one hour (slideshare.net)
• Get To The Number One Position On Google (ronmedlin.com)
• Congrats to Google Webmaster Central – 1 million YouTube Views! (techburgh.com)

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Tips To Optimize Video Podcasts

There is no other way to put it; the World Wide Web is big business. As an example, you only have to look at the phenomenal success of the online bookstore, Amazon. In 2008, Amazon brought in over nineteen billion dollars in income, yet only required an operating budget of approximately eight hundred and fifty million dollars. It really is no surprise to anyone then that more businesses are investing in expanded web presence and capability.   Yet, not every organization has the same successes. Barnes and Noble was selling books online before Amazon was even an idea, and yet it isn’t Barnes and Noble that people think of when considering online bookstores, it’s Amazon. The key? Amazon took greater advantage of the opportunity to effectively market their product.

Search Engines, Spiders and Websites, Oh My

The most important and often least understood tool for online marketers is the search engine. The primary type of search engine is the web crawler – these are largely automated programs that crawl through available web pages, indexing data according to a variety of parameters. In short, the crawler, or spider, examines each page of a website. Once it has examined the page, it submits it to an index. Then, when a person uses the search engine software, the index provides links to these pages, ranked according to relevance. It is worth mentioning two other points. First, not all engines index the same way. Some use keyword density; others focus on the content of the first paragraph.   Second, any changes to a webpage are likely to affect search rankings, so webmasters must carefully consider each change and its possible effects.

I Never Meta Tag I Didn’t Like

One important part of preparing a page for good search engine rankings is effective use of HTML meta-tags. These tags do not directly relate to the position a site will have in a search result, but they do offer webmasters some control over the way their sites are presented when they come up in a search. In brief, meta-tags are additional bits of code added to the head of your HTML document, right after “TITLE.” Because of the tendency for unscrupulous coders to find and abuse loopholes in search technologies, search engines do not rely heavily on these tags for rankings. Their benefits to web users are important, however.

First, there is the Meta Description tag. This is a brief report about the content of the webpage in question. When a search engine presents users with a hyperlink, there is frequently a small description accompanying that result. In many cases, that is the Meta Description tag the Webmaster put in the HTML document so that when a spider visits the site, it indexes this information. This is not always the case, however; Google in particular will generate its own description for a site.

The Meta Description is often the first piece of information someone using a search engine will see. The URL may not mean anything to them, but this description will. If it is poorly written, the user will likely skim right past the site for one that presents itself more effectively. Thus, the key is effective, concise writing that conveys exactly what the site is about.

The second tag is the Meta Keywords tag. This tag is a list of keywords the Webmaster considers most pertinent to each page.    Proper use of the keywords tag is also vital. While search engines use a variety of keyword systems, and have in recent years de-emphasized the Meta Keywords tag, it still contributes to website rankings and should not be neglected. The best method is to examine each page carefully, and pick approximately ten keywords that best represent the data therein. Too many nonspecific keywords will lead to inconsistent search results, and too few means missing an opportunity to get a message in front of users. In addition, many sites are actively on the lookout for keyword abuse. Google in particular is known to ban certain pages from its index entirely if they consider the article to be an abusive, loophole-seeking piece.

There are other, less relevant tags that can provide some benefits, though they aren’t as important as the previous two. An example is the Robots tag, which is only useful in making sure certain sites do not index a particular page. This can help a Webmaster keep their content from being associated with undesirable elements, but it does not contribute directly to higher search placement.

No Meta Tag is an Island

Once again, it must be stressed that meta-tags are not a magical solution to the very complex problem of online marketing. They must be regarded as one tool in an inventory of other tools, and should be used responsibly. Properly implemented, they will help complete an effective marketing strategy. ——————————————————————————————————- Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat.   Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Related articles by Zemanta

• 3 Reasons for Using Adsense (ronmedlin.com)
• SEO Tips- Meta Tags (techtalkformoms.com)
• Steps to Spider Friendly Website (mt-soft.com.ar)

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | What Are Meta Tags and Why Do I Need Them?