Site Optimization: Key Points to Remember - URLs, Titles, and Meta Data
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URLs, title tags and meta tags describe your site and its pages to visitors and search engines. They need to be relevant, compelling and accurate for your site to rank well in the search engines. They are good points for including your keywords, since search engines tend give these areas a certain amount of weight when indexing web pages.
You want the URL of your pages to be both brief and descriptive. The URL should reflect the site's navigation. URLs of individual pages should give some clue as to what the page is about, so a visitor seeing just the URL will know what they can expect to find. This can be very tricky with dynamic URLs. If the page provides data to a database so that the appropriate records can be displayed, both search engines and site visitors might gag when they see it.
For example, someone viewing a URL such as http://www.myopinionatedsite/reviews/
movies/Narnia knows that they will probably see a review of the recent movie made from the book "Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." Compare that with the URL at Amazon for the page that features the three-DVD set for the same movie: http://www.amazon.com/gp/
product/B000069CFH/qid=1136761365/sr=8-1/
ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl74/
104-6616978-9415132?n=507846&s=dvd&v=glance.
Note that qid=, r=, ref=, and so forth indicate dynamic parameters; these tell databases what records to retrieve. Notice also that there are more than three dynamic parameters in this URL. That is bad; ideally, there should never be more than two dynamic parameters in a URL.
Here is a point you might want to keep in mind about the well-written URL. It can serve as its own anchor text when someone else picks it up and pastes it into other venues such as blogs or forums. A search engine finding the first URL listed, then, might give credit to the page for myopinionatedsite, reviews, movies, and Narnia. Notice that I said "might;" as with everything, this is subject to the search engine's analysis. But it is much more likely to happen than if your URLs look more like Amazon's.
Title tags not only serve as a place to put keyword terms, they also help encourage people to visit your site. Your title tag shows up in the blue link text and headline for a search engine result. So you want it to be informative and draw visitors to your site, without sounding too much like sales text. You should use the title tag to show your keywords, help brand the site, and sum it up as clearly and concisely as possible.
For instance, if your site is for a zoo, and you have a page devoted to tigers, don't use simply "tigers" in the tag; try "Tigers -- Habitat, Appearance, Behavior -- Your Zoo's Name." Similarly, if you have a website for an electronics store, you probably have a title tag that reads something like "Plasma Televisions, Plasma TV, Plasma Screen TVs, SONY Plasma Screen TV, LCD TV at Your Store's Name." It would be much cleaner to use "Plasma Screen and LCD Televisions at Your Store's Name." Remember, your title tag provides a potential visitor with a first impression; a web surfer will decide whether to click on the link, or go elsewhere, based on what they see in the search engine results and how inviting they perceive it to be.
Meta tags matter for almost the same reasons. While the use of meta tags, especially the meta keywords tag, has declined to the point that search engines no longer use them in their ranking of pages, potential site visitors still see them. A number of search engines display the text of the meta tag below the clickable page title link in their results. Because of this, while a description in the meta tags may no longer influence where a page ranks in the search engine results, it can still affect the number of visitors your site receives from search engines. Note that meta tag descriptions are something a search engine may choose not to display; the odds are better that the description will be displayed if it is accurate, well-written, and relevant to the query made by the searcher.
That's all I have time and space for right now. I hope you've enjoyed reading so far. In my next article on this topic, I will address the remaining points to remember when optimizing a website: search engine friendly text, information architecture, and "canonical issues" surrounding duplicate content. See you then!
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