Point 1: "Title"

This appears at the very top of your web browser. If you look up now, you should see "Web Design SEO and Internet Marketing Tips Blog | Full Impact Web Design, Ft Collins, CO." because that's the "Title" on this blog page.

Point 2: "Meta Tags"

Meta Tags appear in the Head of your document. Basic Meta Tags include: Title, Content-Type, Copyright, Author, Robots, Description and Keywords. You can "right-click" on this page and select "View Source" (Internet Explorer & Safari), or "View Page Source" (Firefox), or just look at the image below to see how they appear.

Point 3: "Indexing Algorithms"

Although this sounds like rocket science, and kind of is, here is an easy way to understand it. Search Engines use Meta Tags in their indexing algorithms, especially "Title" and "Description". Think of it like this, search engines spider all of the content on your page, looking at where certain terms appear and how they are used. They then apply a "weighting" method. In this scenario, the "Title" would be assigned a weight of around 12. The "Description" would be assigned a weight of around 5. Random occurrences throughout the content would be assigned a weight of 1 each. There are also other instances that will be assigned weights between 1 and 10, but for brevity, we'll stop here. From this example, you should be able to understand the importance of correctly optimizing these tags. Having keywords appear in the "Title" and "Description" have the combined weight of 16-17 random occurrences in your remaining site content.

Image Showing Meta Tags, Title & Description

But I Thought Mata Tags Aren't That Important Anymore

One of the things that really irks me is when I see someone's website and the Title is simply "Home", or just the company's name. Let me explain. Let's say that you are a sculptor and you are selling bronze sculptures and would like people who are simply searching for "Bronze Sculptures" to find you. Let's further say that the name of your business is "Jesse Ventura's Creations". We can see in this scenario that your business name does not contain any of the desired search terms that reflect what you do and the word "Home", contains even less. Reminds me of the Richard Jenny routine about the Lint Sucking Stumps: "We had less than nothing, and we were grateful." (I guess you had to be there.) Anyway, back to the subject.

Good SEO starts in the source code (HTML) of your document, so it's best to build it in from the very beginning and "Meta Tags" are arguably one of the most important things to consider in SEO, especially "Title" and "Description". I know, I know, you have probably heard that Meta Tags are not that important any more, and many so called SEO consultants will tell you the same. Well, I can tell you from experience that this is a crock.

Case in point, my wife has a computer service business and she hired me, of course, to do her website. Since she does most of her work "On-site", she wanted this term to score high in search results. I came up with a way of optimizing her site to score high using either term, "Computer Service" or "Onsite Computer Service". Later, she noticed that the term "Onsite" did not appear in the "Title", so she added it, and immediately, the site dropped 7 places on a search for just "Computer Service". So don't tell me that "Meta Tags don't matter anymore" Just adding one word cost 7 places in search results. This dropped the site from a first page ranking to page 2.

While you want to get your name out there, unless a consumer is searching specifically for your company name, the site will most likely not come up in search results unless the keywords and phrases that "describe" your business appear in the "Title" & "Description". Since we are all looking for "new" customers or clients, doesn't it make sense to make it easier for them to find us? After all, if they already know your company name, they are not new, are they?



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It is important to know several things relative to website design that effect the overall performance of your site.

1.) Flash does not optimize very well.

2.) Images do not optimize at all (Except for alt tags, and file names)

3.) Javascript effects, along with HTML and CSS, mimic flash content and optimize very well.

Having said this, I will also add there are times when flash is appropriate. If you are incorporating a Flash presentation, or perhaps an advertising banner into your content, Flash can be very effective. What I am mainly warning of is OVERUSE of it. Some people have entire websites designed with Flash and they will suffer in SEO as a result. There are other alternatives that create some of the same effects that do optimize well such as jQuery and MooTools, They use a script which calls in content that is completely visible in the source code. That same content is also readable by search engines. The header on this site is a good example. All of the text that fades in is completely visible to search engines, thus it optimizes well.

My purpose in writing about this is not to "bash flash", but merely to point out that using too much of it can hurt your rankings. I use it myself on a selective basis and believe it is an effective tool in the designers toolkit.



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