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Is Your Website Invisible?

By Heshy Friedman

We were recently approached by a company that was in the process of creating a new website from a template. They hired us to take over the project, and handle the art and aesthetics for the site because they were having difficulty doing this on their own. We completed the work on the visuals, and they were satisfied. After our task was completed, we turned the website back over to their technical staff, and they launched it.

They contacted us shortly after to inform us that they could not find their site anywhere on the web. The only way it could be found was entering the exact address of the site. As it turns out, they had completely neglected to set any title tags, meta tags, and picture alt tags, making their site difficult to find online.

Title tags and meta description tags are critically important components of SEO. Without them, the search engines are lacking a basic knowledge of how they should index the site, and this will negatively affect your search rankings.

Title tags are the prominent words displayed on a given page of results. They are the first results that a viewer sees when searching on the web. They also show up on the browser’s header tab describing the web page name. It is important to choose tags that have a direct relation to your organization’s function, and to use words that customers might use when searching for a product or service. Each page in the website should also have individualized title tags.

The meta description tag is text that describes the function of the website or web page. It is a synopsis of the page in sentence format, and should be longer than the title. It often shows up in a search results page directly under the title in smaller text. It acts as a summary for the content of the page itself, and is the information that Google and other search engines usually choose to display a synopsis. Meta descriptions should also contain strategic keywords, and should be individualized for each page.

Images used on websites should also be tagged using the alt syntax. This attributes additional keywords and is especially relevant on online image searches.

One more important consideration regarding keywords and text is that important keywords should all be placed as live text within the page body content. The keywords should be strategically placed within the text body, and the homepage of a site should have the most important keywords that will typically be looked for a search.

On all new websites that we launch, we’ll work with our customers to come up with a sound keyword and tag strategy. For deeper SEO integration, we’ll actually do the research and come up with the exact title, description, alt tags, and website text content. We’ll work with you to make sure that your website can be found!