Skip to content
May 16 10

Is optimizing my site worth it?

by Johnnie Web

So like most businesses you have a website, but you can barely find yourself on Google.  You compete in a space like “church” where every other church is competing for the same position you are.  Even though most church websites are terrible and yours is awesome, you still don’t rank high at all…groan.  So is it even worth trying to rank well?

Short of buying advertisements or spending a fortune on search engine optimization (SEO), a year ago I would have said you need to find different ways of reaching your potential market.  But that has changed a lot recently with Google moving to more integrated search and its recent new interface launch.

Google has implemented tools behind the scenes to know where you are in the world based on your IP address.  Using this geolocation, they are now offering search results and advertisements that are relevant to your location.

So if someone seaches on the keyword “church” in your area, a Google Map will be shown with churches in the area including a list of churches in the area.  This means you have a high probability of showing up in the results on the first page!

So how do you show up in this result? Google composes these results based on the address and phone number you post on your site.  So make sure there is a text version of your phone number (not an image) on every page of your site and that you address is on at least your contact page.  This is just good practice to do anyway.  Once you’ve done that, then of course you need to do the traditional SEO 101 things to rank well.  Over time, patience will help you rank on the first page in the traditional results for these common keyterms, but you need to keep focusing on providing good content and value to your visitors.

Leave a Comment
Apr 17 10

SEO 101: META Description

by Johnnie Web

The META description is within the HTML <header> of each web page on your site.  It looks like:

<meta name=”description” content=”Short description goes here” />

Like META Keywords, the description was originally one of the big influencing factor on search engines that defined what the site or page is about.  This tag is no longer used in the algorithms to determine what the page is about.  It was yet another feature that SEO companies would traditionally stuff with keywords or content in order to rank higher.  Even though it no longer carries any weight, it is an extremely important tag.  Google, Bing and other search engines now use the description in many cases as the description within the search engine results page (SERP).  For instance, at the time this was written if you search on “shirts” at Google, the first result is for Threadless:

Threadless graphic t-shirt designs; cool & funny t-shirts weekly …
New graphic t-shirts released weekly. Awesome new designs submitted and rated by the Threadless community.

The description for Threadless below the link is what you find within their META Description tag on the page.  Considering the fact that a large percentage of your visitors come from search engines, what you say here can mean the difference between having a visitor and not.  It needs to be concise and highly relevant to the page they are visiting on your site.  If what they see on the page they visit doesn’t correlate with what you have on the page, it will cause a higher bounce rate for that page and they will most likely never come back.  Additionally, having a better META Description than your competitors that appear in the SERP will impact whether someone is interested in actually clicking on your link.

In review:

  • Use the META Description on every page of your site
  • Make it relevant to the page they are visiting
  • Keep it to less than 80 characters and make sure the copy makes sense.
  • Make it unique for each page on your site
Leave a Comment
Apr 16 10

SEO 101: META Keywords

by Johnnie Web

META Keywords  is a header tag embedded in a web page that identifies primary keywords on a page.  This tag is embedded in the <head> portion of your HTML and may look like:

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″ />

You can’t see this tag unless you take a peek in the source code of the page.  META Keywords were one of the main ranking factors that search engines used to identify what was important on a page.  But unfortunately, once the SEM industry caught on to how well it worked, it was abused.  The search engines also improved their algorithms to determine what was important on a page.  Today, you can ignore META Keywords as they have no bearing on your website.  Most every site still have META Keywords on their sites, but they are rarely optimized and are merely hangover legacy information that has no impact on your SEO efforts.

Leave a Comment