Archive for the ‘Better web content’ Category

Metadata: No excuse for not doing it right

Posted on: by Kirsten | 2 Comments

Seeing as I haven’t come up with a lot of curiosities lately, I thought I would write some posts about what I know — web content.

I’m always astonished to see how many people don’t write proper meta titles and descriptions for their websites.

When your site appears as the result of a google query, it’s an embarrassing failure when your metadata comes up like this:

Home | Monkey

Best viewed at 1024×768 / JAVA required / Copyright all right reserved by MONKEY(c) 2008.

When your metadata could look something like this:

Home | Monkeymart

Buy all kinds of monkeys online at Monkeymart: baboons, howler monkeys, marmosets, spider monkeys and more…

Sure, if you have an out-of-the-box blog, you don’t have to worry — meta data is created for you. But if you’re building anything that doesn’t have a built-in content management system (and in many cases, even if you do have a content management system), it’s retarded not to take an extra couple hours to bang out custom meta titles and descriptions for each and every page.

After all, meta titles and descriptions are in many cases the first impression you make — either when you come up in search results, or when someone posts your link on Facebook.

You’re already spending hours tweaking graphics, code and copy to make your site perfect and shiny. Why not take a little more time to:

  1. Research the top keywords for each page.
  2. Incorporate those keywords into proper meta titles and descriptions.
  3. Make sure you write a relevant call to action into each meta description.
  4. Make a short list of the meta keywords you want to include. (After all, some engines still use them.)
  5. Paste titles, descriptions and keywords into the metadata fields in your site’s headers.

The results:

  • Your site will rank better on the search engines
  • Your search results and Facebook links will make sense
  • Each little visible sentence of metadata will address the business goals of your website

It’s so easy. And it’s amazing how many people, in a mad rush to finish and launch a site, do a half-assed job on this one tiny, but very significant detail.