Would you like more traffic to your website?
Whether it is a blog or a shopping site you need traffic for your website to be a success. One way to do so is to work on your SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization. Typically people optimize for Google, but it is also good to consider traffic from Yahoo and ask.com as secondary targets.
Content First, SEO Second
Once you have good original content on your website, it is time to consider SEO. There are many different tasks involved in SEO, and I admit that I still need to do many tasks on my websites as well, so I've added the webmaster and SEO category and a SEO series for these articles that any website can use to improve its results.
The main problem is that it is a lot of work! SEO is not yet automated. If you use a CMS like Wordpress or Joomla, you might find special plugins and modules to help you, but you still have to type in the information that the system needs.
The focus in this post is in adding a Meta content description tag to each page of your website. Meta tags are nothing new. Meta tags are informative HTML tags placed in the header of a web page's code. There are many meta tags used for many different reasons.
Adding meta page descriptions to static HTML is simple
Add the following to each of your page headers describing that page:
<meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of your page.">
Add a description of that specific page instead of the 'informative description here'. If you use static HTML pages on your website then simply go into your code with your favorite editor and add the code in between the head tags. You should be concise and descriptive. You should not repeat the title since that is going to be seen in the search result above the description.
Dynamic pages often require coding or SEO plugins
If you use a dynamic header through a CMS or website template using PHP then it is trickier, since one header is used for all of your pages. In this case you could perhaps make your own PHP modification if you are a programmer, or you could search for a plugin or module to add that information for you. Even with a plugin, you will still have to add that data in your CMS software. In a wordpress blog, you'll probably see it as an extra field in your writing admin. page after the plug in is activated. Once you activate a plugin with this functionality you'll have to go and add meta data to each page, post, and article you have.
Meta page descriptions improve search click through rates
You won't see results until Google's webcrawler rechecks your site. It doesn't matter if your pages are static or dynamic. This could take between hours and weeks. After Google's search engine updates your information and a page on your site appears as a search result, your description will appear after your page's title. By giving a more detailed description of your page, your page will be more interesting to the person searching and you should get more clicks. It should also lower your bounce rate, since people know what your page really contains.
What meta descriptions won't do for you
Adding meta descriptions will not improve your page ranking. Your web pages will appear at the same rank. This optimization is for increasing clicks on your pages when seen in the listing. You will need to do other optimizations to improve page ranking.
No comments:
Post a Comment