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Reptetition, Repetition, Repetition....

"I'm concerned that I'm repeating myself."

That's what a new client told me the other day as she worked on the Content Intake Packet (CIP) that we provided her. We developed this CIP as a way of helping clients organize their content and make it as powerful as it can be, especially with an eye towards search engine friendliness and readability.

For each page of the prospective Web site, there's a field for Title, Header and meta-description tag.

Title: The title tag may be the most important variable for the search engines, yet many people have never noticed it until I point it out. It appears outside the browser window, in the -- duh -- title bar. On the Mac it's right up there next to the red, yellow and green buttons. On Windows you'll find it next to the minimize, maximize and close buttons. (Still can't find it? Check out this post on Web page anatomy.)

Title tags should be descriptive, unique to the content on each page, and use the keywords people are searching for when looking for a product or service like the one you offer. It's also the big blue text on a search engine's results page, so it may be the first impression that a prospect has of you.

Headers: Headers appear within the page. For you HTML monkeys out there, it's everything between the <H#> tags. Because these are structurally more important on the page, search engines pay attention to these tags as well. They should reiterate the theme of the title tag as well.

They're also important because people don't read on the Web, they scan. Headers let them quickly find the information they're interested in.

Meta-Description: Meta-tags used to be extremely important to search engine optimization, but that was about 8 years ago. Now they have little to no impact on your search engine ranking, depending on who you talk to. However, it's a good idea to have a unique meta-description for each page, as search engines often use these descriptions on the results page. Think of it like free advertising. Here's an example:

Otherwise, the search engines may just grab some random text from your Web page that matches up against the search words used. This meta-description does not appear on your page, but rather on the underlying code only.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition....
Since the title appears outside the browser window, the header appears within it, and the meta-description appears only in the source code and on the search engine results page, it's OK to repeat the same text or reword it in a similar way.

Each of these serve a different purpose, but they all build upon each other to help the search engines understand why your site should rank well when a prospect is searching for what you have to offer.

It's a good idea to go Google yourself -- don't worry, you won't go blind -- to see what your prospects see when they search. If you don't like the results, you can change your title tag and meta-description and a few weeks or even days later, see your improved result.

Rich Brooks
Search Engine Optimization

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