You may not know it but you see the results of the META title and description tags every time you use a search engine.  The title and short description that is displayed on the Search Engine Results Page (or SERP) is actually taken directly from the META tags coded into your site.

META tags are a part of the underlying HTML code that makes up your website. They provide search engines with important information about your site such as page titles, descriptions, and keywords. Unfortunately, properly optimized META tags are often overlooked as many people are unsure of what benefit they provide.

The above example shows the Search Engine Result for the Google Translate page. Notice that they included a relevant description of the page in the title as well as a brief description of what the page offers.

The key with these META tags is to think of them as your billboard on the Search Engine Results Page. The META Title is the headline that grabs peoples attention and the META Description is the short summary that draws them in.

Here are a few tips for working with your own META title and META description tags:

META Title:

• Give each page a unique title
• Make sure the title is relevant to the content on the page
• For maximum compatibility with all search engine make sure your META title is no more than 65 characters
• Think of this as the heading to your “billboard” on the Search Engine Results Page. Try to make the title enticing to the searcher.

META Description:

• Give each page a unique description
• Make sure your META description is relevant to the page and is enticing to searchers
• For maximum compatibility with all search engine make sure your META title is no more than 155 characters
• Think of this as a short advertisement. Engage the searcher with action words.

Did you know that you can stop Google from indexing certain pages in your website? You can, with a certain tool called “robots.txt”

Robots.txt , as you might have already guessed, is a text file that you can put on your website that will direct programs that crawl the web (web crawling bots) and give them certain directions. If you had a page that you didn’t want any web crawler to access, you could command web crawlers not to index it.

Let’s say you were running a personal website for MC Hammer, and you had a webpage concerning his finances that you didn’t want any search engines to crawl. Here’s what you would do:

1) Create a file called robots.txt in the root directory of your website. If you had www.mchammer.com <http://www.mchammer.com>, the link would look like http://www.mchammer.com/robots.txt

2). If you were trying to block web crawler access to “seenBetterDays.html” The contents of this file will look like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /seenBetterDays.html

If the file was in a subdirectory, if would look like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /subdirectoryname/seenBetterDays.html

The asterisk after User-agent denotes that this rule applies to all robots, not just Google, yahoo, or any one robot specifically.
If you wanted to disclude the entire subdirectory, it would look like this.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /subdirectoryname/

This will block web crawler access to all files within /subdirectory name/ . If you wanted to disallow access to the entire subdirectory, except for the file “exception.html,”, you would put this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /subdirectory name/
Allow: /subdirectory name/exception.html

Finally, if you decided that you’ve had enough of the internets and all its pervasive indexing and searching, you would put in this content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This basically means no robot will ever visit www.mchammer.com <http://www.mchammer.com> again, until you remove the file.

There are many, many, many more uses for robots.txt, but we’ve covered the basics in this article, so that if you have a certain webpage or group of webpages that you don’t want to be crawled, you can just include a file and keep your information a little bit more private.

Simple is good, but beware of oversimplifying. A homepage needs to be more than just one picture of your product with an “enter” link. Gone are the 1990’s. You need to design your homepage for 2 audiences – your visitors (humans) and the search engines (robots). Here are some tips:

• Include a brief yet specific text introduction of what your business does.
• Include at least 1 important call to action (phone number, special offer sign up, buy now link)
• Include a testimonial from your customer.
• Include a few very strong photos that compliment your copy (photos of your products, your customers, or great stock photos).
• Include a bulleted list of your key products/services.
• Include links to all other key pages in your web site.
• Make sure your logo and company name or slogan is very prominent.

Your homepage needs to capture the attention of a person in only a few seconds, and encourage them to DO something (call to action) which leads to closed business.  This page also needs to have enough text information on it for search engines to actually read and understand what the website is about.

What tools do you use to evaluate your sites SEO?

Hopefully by now you know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for increasing your site rank with search engines.

When trying to increase your site ranking and boost your SEO it is important that you have a clear sense of your rankings so you can determine if your methods have been successful.

The SEO for Firefox add-on allows instant access to voluminous amounts of SEO related data. It can show your sites rankings with Google, Alexa, Yahoo, Digg, Twitter, and many more.

Easy access to this information allows you to properly evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and gives you the data needed to fine-tune your approach.

Add SEO for Firefox to your SEO toolbox by visiting their site: SEO for Firefox

We often field questions about search engines and how a small business with limited budget can drive traffic to their web site. Most people want to know, what can they do themselves, without hiring anyone, without spending much money. There are probably hundreds of details in that response, but here are the basics of what I say:

If you have even a few hundred dollars, you will get a much better ROI if you hire a true consultant in SEM and/or SEO. Get a comprehensive proposal with proven results from the consultant, and try to hire a company that really knows search. Personally I think it’s better to hire a company that specializes in search marketing specifically, instead of a company that does both that and web site development; but others would argue with me. Then hook the SE consultant up with your web site designer to have everyone playing for the same team.

If you want to do something helpful with your own in-house resources, write. Write a lot. Manage a regular blog, add industry related articles to your web site, submit “expert columns” to other publications, ask an assistant or intern to write articles and “tips of the day” for you. Participate in forums or help sites that relate to your expertise. Submit short tips and blurbs on networking web sites. Participate in newsgroups. Update your profile on other community web sites a lot, write some little blogs there (if you have a myspace page for your music business, perhaps).

If your employees have web sites, make sure they are selling you. Remember that anyone working for you has a potential reputation influence on your company. If your employee has a personal myspace or facebook page, check it for anything that might be unappealing to you or your customers and prospects, and possibly ask those employees to use the “private” setting to prevent open public viewing of all that information. If you have employees who participate in other web site communities, forums, and networking sites, try to encourage them to approach it in a professional manner with links back to your company web site and use those opportunities as sales pitches.

Planning to redesign your web site? Always good to hear! Here are a few tips for improving your web site, even on a limited budget.

1. Keep your logo in the top left corner, linked to the main url.

It seems so simple. But there are still many sites that do not practice this. More and more usability and user-preference studies are showing that visitors expect your logo (or company title) to be in the top left hand corner. If your brand is the first thing the visitor sees, they understand where they are from the beginning. The brand then leads the visitor into your core content and coaxes them through the web site in a natural reading flow: top-to-bottom, left-to-right.

2. Develop a clear subheading for the top of your home page.

By subheading, I mean a short, summarized description about your business. Think about your specialty, your industry focus, and state it. I recommend including this in plain text (not a graphic) somewhere in your heading – preferably as the first line of text in your code following your logo. A good placement is in the top right corner or beneath your main navigation menu. What does this do? It tells a human visitor right away what the web site is about – so they know they found the right business for their needs and are interested in reading further; it gives the search engines some strong key phrase food.

Here is an example of a strong subheading:
Custom Window Dressing Services for Hotels and Universities

3. Include geographical words whenever applicable.

If you are focused on serving a specific city, state, country, or any region, you should mention it. This will help fine tune the content in your web site and better feed the right information to search engines. In turn, you will receive more targeted visitors.

Here is an example of a good subheading when location is brought into the picture:
Austin Texas Corporate Litigation Services
Austin Furniture Restoration Services

Location can also be nicely incorporated in contact information. Which brings us to #4…

4. Post your contact info in highly visible spots.

Customers tend to get very frustrated when they can’t find your phone number or email address. They have a question, but they have to dig around for several minutes to ask you? Don’t count on that level of patience. Most visitors leave a site within a few of seconds if they don’t see what they want. Great places to include your key contact info:

• in the top right corner of your web page heading
• in a horizontal divider bar beside your menu links
• repeated within the content of your home page and other pages
• in a colorful, eye-catching box in your content or in a left hand side bar
• repeated in the footer near your copyright statement