This is a constructive Criticism article. Take it for what you wish as people have different means of skills on web development and budgets, but some people pay for development and the sites built lack some of the very basic SEO things that can Greatly help increase your website traffic and ability for people to find you and your site!
Meta Tags. Often not used by developers for whatever reason…! For the not so tech savvy people, meta tags are the little description you see on search engines under the title. You know, the things you read on search engines before you click.. Yah Those!
Your meta tags should contain keywords that pertain to your site, what people already search for and invite the user in while all making sense!
Page Title. Just as important as the meta tags. Page titles are important and so are the keywords used! They should also be inviting and trust worthy or it will = a passer by.
Page titles should be more then “Home Page” or “FAQ’s” ! For a lack of better terms,My Webmaster Sucks is what you should be writing as the Email Title when looking for a new web dude.
The meta tags and page title are about the most basic things a website has, with a lot of POWER and should be no “extra cost”!
Let’s go with a couple examples from a BIG COMPANY… at a rate of about $50 a month x’s 12 = $600/yr on the low end.
First, just because the company is trusted and Big.. doesn’t mean they offer or do what they should. If you see a lot of fluff (like fancy names, technical terms you have no clue about etc) you may question a little bit. Ask or look at their portfolio and it’s more then just a pretty page that you should be sold on. You can have the best site in the world, but if nobody can find it, what good is it!
One company, two mistakes on two different sites (most sites really in their portfolio, but I am not going to post them all. The “dream team” over at Godaddy are the builders! Love the registrar, just not sure about this service….
PlayaStuff.com a site build by the dream team. I couldn’t find them on Google searching for playa stuff which you should be able to as it’s not a highly searched term and they hold the exact match domain name with content. I could find the site with quotes around the term, but not many people search like that.
Title used is Useless! It’s useless for SEO and it’s Useless for inviting in the searcher.
Home Page is not a good title to use! Now in this case, the Meta is at least in place (on purpose) and does explain what the site offers… it’s just lacking keywords but isn’t overly all that bad.
How about Godaddy’s newest Godaddy Girl™ Erin Kalin’s site. How did the dream team do on her site with meta and title?
Not very good! Both the title and meta are lacking. Keep in mind this is very basic webmaster stuff that should be in place and it greatly hurts SEO, trust and is not inviting to a search engine searcher!
The title is keyword weak and Ugly. It does hold two important keywords erin kalin but beyond that it’s Junk.
A better home page title would be something like this:
Erin Kalin Country Singer and Godaddy Girl Official Site
A.) since Erin is new to country music, people will search for “what they are thinking”erin kalin country singer. Some may search for her as the Godaddy Girl and all will be looking for her Real Site.. aka Official Site. Google has an eye for picking the real Official Site and ranking it well. Plus the title holds important keywords.
B.) The meta is “out of control”. Without setting the meta description, search engines like to grab whatever they can. This nearly always doesn’t match what should be put in place!
Erin’s meta is a little scary really.. it speaks of “if you see this message, you will need to download” blah blah.. not good. Not inviting to a searcher, keyword weak, not trusted as people are not fans of the “download” term right off the bat and just a plain waste of space.
Erin’s home page meta should include that she is a country singer, recent album released and other interesting keyword rich data about her.
Each and every page of your website should hold a title and meta description. Do a search on Google or any search engine using site:yourdomainnamehere.com to see indexed pages. If the meta and title are not correct, go back and tell the webmaster to Fix It or if you do your own site, go in and fix it.
Your domain name plays a key role in people finding your site as well. Erin does a great job with her domain name. She is Erin Kalin and her domain matches. If you have questions about domain names, read around DotWeekly and you will see plenty of content about domain names, what’s good, good uses of a domain name, what isn’t good and so on.