When you start building your
website and WahmsShoppe eStore you will see a little box that
says:
Meta NAME="Description" Meta Tag
Meta NAME="Keywords" Meta Tag
So what exactly are these boxes for?
Well a simple explanation is this is your
description and the keywords you would like
associated with your site. This is not for your site
visitors but for the search engines.
It is rumored that search engines do not pay much
attention to these tags anymore due to unethical
use. That does not justify not using them, so let's
talk about proper ways use these tags?
The Meta Description is just that, a
description of your site. DO NOT cram this full of
keywords, or write a very lengthy description.
Decide what the main theme of
your site is about and base your description on
this.
Think of what sets your site or items apart from
the competition. Try to narrow down your
description so that you will get shoppers to
find exactly what they are looking for.
Keep your description short, a good rule of
thumb is no more than 150 characters
Make sure the description matches the same
content on the page associated with it. You have
two places to put these meta tags, one is the
website home page, and the other is the eStore.
It is best to do two separate meta tag
description and keywords for both of these
pages.
Write it so it is reader friendly, although it
is made for search engines. Many search engines
will take your meta tag description and put it
on the blurb right under the link to your store
so it needs to be easily read by a human being.
Meta Keywords are just the keywords, not full
sentences, that will help visitors find your site.
With keyword meta tags there are many more DO NOT's
then Do's so we will discuss those.
DO NOT:
Cram it full of every keyword
that could "possibly" be associated with your
site.
Use it to list every product you have on your
site
Include products or keywords that not even on
your site at all, to try to route people to your
site.
What you SHOULD DO is:
Use keywords that describe
your store properly
Keep it to 200 characters or less
Use keyword phrases and or variations on the
keywords
Only use keywords that are in the content of
your page
Use separate keywords for your website page and
your splash page.
Example of keyword meta tag:
keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword or you can leave
out the commas and just list your keywords like
this: keyword keyword keyword keyword
Remember to include the same keyword phrase that you
used in your description and keyword Meta Tag. Do
this by putting quality content on the main section
of your page that the tag is associated with.
It can take anywhere from one day
to several months for the search engines to pick up
and index your keywords. The fastest way to get them
to do this is to have lots of links pointing to your
site. The more links pointing them back to your
site, they more often they keep coming back to make
sure the freshest content is in their database.
I hope this helps anyone just
starting out.
