How to create search engine friendly Title and META Tags (part 2)

Guest post by Kalena Jordan



In part one, I defined Title Elements and META Tags and took you step-by-step through how to create an optimized Title Element. Now it's time to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.

Create Your META Description Tag

Now it's time to create your optimized META Description Tag.

Take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let's say our existing description is:

[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentine's Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]

You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed by search engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his article How to Use HTML Meta Tags, 200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine. So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.

Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets


Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your website and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available.

Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to encourage readers to click on your link. Let's start with:

If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.

Ok, so that's around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it's a bit bland. We need to add something to entice the searcher to click on it. How about:

Order online for a 10 percent discount!

So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:

[META name="description" content="If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!"]

Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it's around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, it speaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to click on the link and view the site.


Create Your META Keywords Tag

We're almost there. Now it's time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quite unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. Bing is the only remaining major search engine putting their hand up to claim they index the META Keywords tag. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywords tags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very little impact on your overall SEO campaign.

Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Keywords Tag is:

[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentine's Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]

You are just including a list of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases you are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don't necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations and combinations that don't appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.

For our fictional florist, these may include things like:

- wedding flowers
- roses
- wedding roses
- Valentine's Day roses
- sympathy gifts
- Mother's Day gifts
- funeral wreaths
- flower deliveries
- floral arrangements
- birthday gifts
- flowers
- flowers for wedding
- wedding decorations

So now we have the following draft META Keywords Tag:

[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, roses, wedding roses, Valentine's Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother's Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, flowers, flowers for wedding, wedding decorations"]

However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times.

So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words "flowers" and "weddings". This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.

For starters, we can lose the single "flowers" as it is already covered by some of the other phrases like "wedding flowers". Next, we can drop "roses" for the same reason. Then we can combine some keyword phrases together to save space, e.g., "flowers for wedding" and "wedding decorations" can be integrated to become "flowers for wedding decorations" so we can lose the extra instance of "wedding".

So now we have the following completed META Keywords Tag:

[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami florists Florida wedding bouquets wedding flowers wedding roses Valentine's Day roses sympathy gifts Mother's Day gifts funeral wreaths flower deliveries floral arrangements birthday gifts flowers for wedding decorations"]

Tailored TITLE and META Tags

While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.

For example, our fictional Miami florist may have a page devoted to wedding bouquets and another devoted to funeral wreaths. The TITLE and META tags for the first page should include keywords relating to weddings and the page about wreaths should utilize keywords relating to funerals and sympathy.

The use of tailored TITLE and META Tags on each page creates multiple entry points to a web site and enables relevant content to be found in search engines no matter where it resides on a site. For example, instead of relying on visitors to arrive via the Home Page, the optimization of individual site pages makes each page more visible in the search engines, providing additional gateways to the site's content. The more pages optimized, the wider the range of keywords and phrases that can be targeted and the more entry points are created to a site.

(This is a two-part article. Read part one here.)

About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

 

How to create search engine friendly Title and META Tags (part 1)

Guest post by Kalena Jordan


In this article, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to create search engine optimized Titles and META Tags. This is a two-part article. This part discusses the Title Element.

The TITLE Element

TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines "look" at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weight to the content of the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a website, TITLE tags look like this one for a fictional florist:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

(Please note that square brackets [ ] have been used in place of open and closing tags < > to prevent this page code from breaking. You'll need to replace all square brackets with open and closing tags.)

To view the HTML code of any site, choose "View, Source" from your browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and choose "view source code".

The META Description Tag

META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search listings.

While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (together with a site's visible content) to provide information about a site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.

In the HTML code of a website, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:

[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentine's Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]

You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.

The META Keywords Tag

While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site's HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.

In the HTML code of a website, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:

[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentine's Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]

The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search ranking, thereby "spamming" the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.



Bing is the only remaining major search engine putting their hand up to claim they index the META Keywords tag. They use it as one of their page quality signals, so it doesn't contribute to page ranking as such. The content of the tag may help Bing understand the context of your page, but it won't impact where your page ranks on Bing. In fact, if it is stuffed with too many keywords or repetitions, the tag may send a *low quality* signal to Bing about your site, so it is best created very carefully or not used at all. 

You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.


Create Your Own Optimized Tags

Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your own site. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your home page.

Create Your TITLE Tag

Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your website to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose but you should use whatever works for you.

Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Title is:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top. For our fictional florist these are:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.

In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:

Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets.

Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I've tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword "Florists" more than once because the sentence I've used covers both "Florists Miami" and "Florists Florida". Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.

Although it's tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don't want to use one here because we don't want "Florists" and "Florida" to be separated.

Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our third keyword phrase "wedding bouquets" is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let's try this:

Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.

We don't want to use a period after "Florida" for the same reason that we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.

In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- florists in Miami
- florists in Florida
- florists in Miami Florida
- wedding bouquets
- Miami wedding bouquets
- Florida wedding bouquets

When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query "Miami florists", you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "florists Miami", because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.

If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a keyword), don't sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first.

In the case of our florist, let's imagine their name was Funky Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our optimized Title as follows:

[TITLE]Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.[/TITLE]

It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more important to you.

The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person's Favorites list when they bookmark your site, so having your company name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.

In part two, I will show you how to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags. 

About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

 

Understanding media lead times

With our in-the-now mentality, it can be difficult to think a season ahead. But that's exactly what's necessary to successfully pitch media outlets with long lead times.

Lead times vary with how frequently a media outlet publishes an issue or runs a particular segment. Here's a quick guide:

• Magazines:  Lead times are most important to consider when pitching magazines. Depending on the publication, lead times can vary from two to five months or more. If you're unsure about which issue the editorial staff is currently working on, feel free to contact them. They will provide you insight into how far ahead you should be in touch.
• TV and Radio:  In general, broadcast outlets plan their coverage first thing every morning as well as provide updates throughout the day. After all, who knows when a fire or some other breaking news event is going to happen? If you're pitching an event, it works out best to send a media advisory a couple of weeks before the event and then again the day before the event. That way the media outlet at least will have the information to consider for coverage.
• Newspapers:  Slightly similar to TV and radio, newspapers cover the news of the day. For regular features like business briefs, event calendars, etc., expect your item to take a few weeks to run. The best approach is to look at the particular section you want to pitch and see if there is information about how far in advance information needs to be sent for publication.

With some planning, you can successfully get your information into the media's hands at the right time.

Taking PR from the 24-hour news cycle to the 24-second Twitter cycle

I recently had a guest post on the Public Relations Society of America PRSAY blog about how public relations professionals can be prepared for their organization’s use of social media and the role that PRSA can play.

Check it out!

A look at Minnesota PRSA in 2012

Now that 2012 is underway, I would like to provide a snapshot of what the Minnesota chapter of Public Relations Society of America (Minnesota PRSA) has in store. As president of the chapter, I see numerous ways that we will advance the profession and the professional this year.

First, I'll start with students -- the future leaders of the public relations profession. Our chapter supports 11 Minnesota-affiliated Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) chapters. I have as a goal for 2012 that a member of our board of directors will visit each of those PRSSA chapters during the year. We need to bridge the gap between PRSSA chapters and Minnesota PRSA; PRSSA graduates receive an excellent discount after graduation as a PRSA Associate Member.

Speaking of younger professionals, at the Classics banquet on March 29, the inaugural recipient of the Young Professional Award will be named. With this award, Minnesota PRSA recognizes the passion of the next generation of leaders and awards a young professional with three to seven years of post-undergrad experience.

The first event on the chapter's programming calendar is coming up at the end of the month:  Minnesota PRSA Pro-Am Day. Pro-Am Day (short for Professional-Amateur Day) is an annual mentoring event matching Twin Cities public relations professionals with PRSSA students in an effort to provide a day of job shadowing and networking for participating students to learn more about the public relations industry. The day wraps up with a fun speed networking event that connects students and professionals on a rapid basis.

If you have been thinking about earning Accreditation in Public Relations (APR), this April offers an excellent opportunity right here in Minneapolis with the APR Boot Camp! The APR Boot Camp is a four-day intensive course for candidates to prepare and advance though the Readiness Review™ and take the computer-based Examination for Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) or Accreditation in Public Relations + Military Communication (APR+M). This course is designed to provide a setting that will meet the needs of busy professionals whose schedules don’t permit extensive preparation time.

Minnesota PRSA programming in 2012 is designed to be compelling, providing excellent opportunities for professionals to develop their skills while having fun networking. Stay tuned to our website and social networks for more events to be announced.


In terms of an online presence, we are in the process of developing a more robust website. It is expected to be done in the first part of the year.


I hope to see you at Minnesota PRSA events this year. Here's to an exciting 2012!

How to find media contact information

While reporters are eager to get the latest scoop, they also are awfully busy people. They are constantly on deadline, and therefore don't want to get inundated with e-mails. As a result, reporters sometimes make it a little difficult to connect with them for pitches.

So how does one get media contact information?

Well, the best approach is to subscribe to a professional database like Cision and Vocus. With these databases, reporters' information is regularly updated, and there also is the ability to distribute media materials directly to reporters through the database.

Here are some options if you do not have access to Cision or Vocus:

1. Media outlet websites. If you know the media outlet that you want to reach, check out its website. Often there will be a "Contact Us" or "Staff Directory" page. While these pages may not be highly prominent on the site, you can use Google for a site search. For instance, here's how I find the staff directory for the StarTribune using Google:  "Staff Directory" site:www.startribune.com
2. Twitter. There are many lists on the Internet of journalists who are on Twitter. Start following the journalists that are of interest to you; if they happen to follow you back, then you can send them a direct message.
3. Help a Reporter Out (HARO). With HARO, journalists post their queries -- the news stories for which they need sources. By taking a look at these queries, you will be able to get a sense of which reporters are covering the stories in your key topic areas.
4. Bylines. Many reporters have their e-mail address or other contact information next to their byline or the end of the article; some TV reporters have their e-mail address under their name on the screen.

So, in essence, if you do not have Cision or Vocus, one of the best ways to get in touch with reporters is to be "media aware." This involves keeping your eyes peeled and ears tuned in for reporters that might be interested in your story. Developing relationships with those reporters will help them to be more receptive to your pitch.

Finally, you could always contact the main number for the media outlet and go through the operator; it's easier when you have the direct line to a reporter, though.

Radio interview tips

So far we've discussed preparing for TV interviews as well as for print (newspaper or magazine) interviews. Getting ready for a radio interview involves a combination of the recommended preparation for a TV or print interview.

As in any interview, it's helpful to know the background information of the radio show and the person who will be interviewing you. Does the show tend to lean toward one side or the other politically? Is the interviewer generally enthusiastic and positive or often stirring up negativity?

Also, think about your objective for the interview -- what you want to get as a result of participating. Consider your key messages; you will want to often come back to these during the interview. Write down supporting facts or examples that you can use during the interview. A great aspect of radio interviews is that they are usually done over the phone; even if the interview is in the studio, you can have your notes in front of you.

According to presentation and media trainer Mary Milla of What's Your Point?, radio interviews have the following characteristics:

• They are generally short (five to 10 minutes long).
• The reporters often know a little bit about the topic.
• A broadcast soundbite typically lasts nine to 15 seconds, so limit your answers to about 30 seconds to avoid being misquoted.

As always, remember to be enthusiastic and to avoid saying "no comment."